Thursday, May 10th four members of the Wings of History Air Museum began preparations for the annual open house at the museum and the South County Airport in San Martin, California. One of the first tasks is to build a safety fence along the taxiway. Pounding down fence posts is rather physically intensive labor.
To make the job go faster and easier we had rented a pneumatic fence post driver, complete with an air compressor and a generator to power it with. When Todd and I arrived with the fork lift and a box full of safety fencing, Don and Steve were still trying to drive the first fence post. The air compressor would only run about twenty seconds before it would trip the breaker on the generator. After several minutes of trying we finally got the pressure up to 100 psi. We hooked up the post driver and got one half hearted thump out of the driver. Air pressure was back at 20 psi.
Todd drove back to the museum, (across the road) and picked up a second generator. We filled the tank with fuel, gave a pull on the starter rope and the generator came to life. The air compressor turned on and the pressure started to rise… Circuit breaker popped at 20 psi.
Here was my chance to save the day. Our motor home has a 7000 watt generator. I volunteered to bring it to the work site and power the air compressor. Wisely we decided to see if this generator would actually power the air compressor, so we towed the air compressor to where Arcturus was parked and fired up the gen-set and plugged into my 20 amp washer/dryer circuit. Sure enough Arcturus bravely charged up the air to 120 psi and never even broke into a sweat.
With that, Judy and I unhooked Arcturus from the trailer, sucked in the sliders and worked through our pre-flight check list quickly. I backed down the road to the airport entrance, skinnied through the guard gate and carefully drove to the fence site. We snaked the power cord back to the air compressor, started Arcturus’s generator and started building pressure. We were almost ready to try the post driver when the gen-set shut down. I hit the starter again and the generator made a half hearted attempt to start then gave up altogether. At that moment I remembered that we had arrived with about 10 gallons of diesel in the fuel tank. As a precaution against running the tank dry while you are camping the generator gets its fuel supply at about the 1/8 tank level. Ten gallons out of eighty gallons is just about 1/8 of a tank.
Pounding down fence posts is rather physically intensive labor. We had two teams of two each and the day was warm. The posts are set and the fence is strung. Just like John Henry, we beat that steam drill down!

It is now Saturday and we, the Dinsmore and Sheppeard families are celebrating my grandson, Patrick Dinsmore’s graduation from high school. Patrick is a graduate of the Ocean Grove Charter School, a home schooling institution. He is the second member of the family to graduate from there. Patrick’s brother, Cody, graduated from the same school in 2008. Their younger brother, Bryce is also going to this school just going into the seventh grade. We need to give their mother, Barb, a huge hand for even taking on this task.
We send greeting to all from Gilroy, California. See you back in Oregon in a couple weeks.
Gary and Judy