The week of the 22nd was more interesting than the last in some ways. That week I helped in the Quonset huts on the side of the museum. There are four huts to the side of the main building. One of them is operated by Eglin AFB security forces as that is the new base visitor center. The other three are being prepared to open as museum exhibits. One for EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), one for African American military history, and one for, I believe, either AFSOC (Air Force Special Operations Command) or POWs (Prisoner of War). I’m not sure if I have ever actually been told what was going in that third hut.
Anyway. That Monday I didn’t end up doing much. And took a short break in the library to look at the B-52 manuals, again. But that Wednesday I was in the EOD hut for a while working on a most frustrating project.
Jonathan Holmes, who was in charge of the hut projects, had asked me to put a mounting bracket onto a flat screen TV so that it could be mounted. Large, easily more than 50 inches. The TV was ready, as was the bracket that needed to be placed onto the TV. The screws provided worked perfectly with the top two holes of the TV. Annoyingly, they were far too short for the bottom two holes as the lower half of the rear of the TV bowed outwards.
So I went back to Jonathan and told him that we had a screwy situation. Initially he was going to go take a look himself, but we ran into Jake on the way there, who deals a lot with the fabrication side of the museum, and he went with me instead. After looking at the screws in the hut, which itself was undergoing maintenance on one of its doors causing us to have to work around the guys fixing it, we went back into the museum proper to check the printing room, which has a few screws and other items like that in a cabinet. Those all proved to be way too small. So we went to the fabrication shop in a separate building on the premises. We looked through several containers of miscellaneous screws before grabbing a pair that seemed like they’d work. So we went back to the EOD hut only to find that the screws were too short.
From there we went back into the fabrication shop and searched in a different room with a different set of drawers. Nothing in there was the right size either, and after checking again we confirmed that nothing in the first set of drawers would work, we went back to the hut to look at the TV again. The TV had, of course, not changed and nor did the screws the mount came with. So we had to unfortunately go back to Jonathans office and give him the bad news, that someone would have to go to a hardware store and buy a new set of screws. To our surprise, he instead pointed to a box that had a bunch of leftover pieces from other techno-furniture that he had assembled in the past.
After quickly sifting through the box and grabbing a pair of screws that looked about right, we went back to the EOD hut, navigating past the guys working on its side door as we did so. The screws we picked out were just long. Almost. These two were just enough to catch the threads of the TV but not long enough to actually hold on. Once again we went back to Jonathan in defeat.
However, after a short conversation, we decided to try one more time, this time taking the box with us to the hut, at Jonathans suggestion. We went back to the hut, past the two guys still trying to fix the seal on the door, and practically dumped the box of stuff onto the floor. And we found two screws long enough for the bracket and the spacer. Finally, after an hour we can finish screwing the bracket onto the TV. Then from that we picked up the TV and fitted it onto the wall mount, testing the quick release switch on the bracket as well. Thus ending the screw saga.
Armament Internship 