My Dad, The Engineer, Part II

My Dad is an Engineer. (For a refresher read Part 1). And since he LOVES when I write about him on this blog, I just had to write a little more...

Engineering is not just part of his educational makeup--I'm pretty sure it's in his blood. At age 11,  he worked a paper route to earn money so he could buy a ham radio he saw advertised his Boy's Life magazine. He became "friends" (think: prehistoric Facebook) with some doctor named Elmo, who he communicated with over the radio. Even the Navy took notice (perhaps due to the fact that he had applied for a radio license) and tried to recruit him--until they found out he was only 13 at the time.

This is a picture of his ham radio set up in 1958 when he was 16, and the president of his ham radio club in high school.

El Presidente

FYI: The prerequisite of being president of the ham radio club in high school is that you must sport a crew cut, and wear plaid.  Check and check. But I digress. Here's the actual story I intended to tell:

Isabella got a battery-operated tea pot a few Christmases back. A little thing with a motor that pushes water up through a tube and out a drip so you can fill the tea pot. It stopped working. I replaced the batteries ('cuz that's what daughters of engineers do) but still the thing would not work. I sent the tea pot home with Mom one Friday afternoon and asked her to have my Dad take a look at it. Dad signed on to the project but decided to wait until Isabella was in town so she could help him. But then Jack was coming to town, so why not impart wisdom on both grandchildren at once? (This Engineer is also a Teacher.)

   

So we're all gathered at Casa Accampo for a little family reunion and Dad pulls out the tea pot and his volt meter. He hooks the thing up to the battery to first test the batteries. I, of course, could have saved him the trouble by reminding him I'd just put in new batteries, but I bit my tongue and let the genius go to work. 

After that it gets a little fuzzy in my head--there was so much science going on in this object lesson it was hard to keep up. The batteries were sound, the water was not being pushed through the tube, but the toy still made sound effects, so The Engineer had to determine if the motor was bad or if there was a bad switch, or if there was a loose wire, yada, yada...
He opened up the toy machine and found the circuit-thing, then tested the terminals of the motor to see if there was voltage across the terminals, which there was, so he knew it was an open circuit?? I'm lost at this point, Isabella is trying to distract Jack by blowing raspberries on his cheeks, and Jack is just barely hanging on.

Mark joins the party to see if he can follow. Dad is in circuitry heaven and his audience is growing.

Isabella gets bored and uses Mark as a jungle gym, as Dad wraps up his examination of the dead tea pot.

 Mom and Buddy get sucked in, making this tea pot postmortem a family affair.

Dad, my favorite engineer,  has declared  the tea pot irreparable on account of a bad motor. The tea pot is destined for the garbage can. I never knew tea pots could be so much fun or so educational, especially when they are broken. But that's what you get when you have an engineer for a Dad.