Equipment Repairs

A decadelong effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays and exacerbated concerns about the Energy Department's ability to maintain the nation's strategic deterrent. The program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the U.S. stockpile.

To get the right sound in the little-known world of high-caliber musical instrument repair, some say it takes a certain touch, perhaps even a degree of voodoo. Musical instrument giant Yamaha Corp. has a different approach, involving cryogenics, fiber optic endoscopy and an ultrasonic cleaning lab.

Beginning Sunday, about 45,000 residents in the Antelope Valley will have limited water supply for a week because of system upgrades, officials at Los Angeles County's Waterworks Districts said Thursday. The reduction in water will affect the agency's District 40 customers in Lancaster and western Palmdale, who are served by the Quartz Hill Water Treatment Plant. The plant will be completely shut down from 6 a.m. Sunday through 6 p.m.

Cheap, funky and wonderfully reliable, the Balboa Island Ferry remains an old-time relic in the crowded waters of tony Newport Bay. This week, for the first sustained period in half a century, the wooden boats that reliably lug cars, locals and vacationers between Balboa Island and the peninsula have stopped chugging. Although the shutdown for overdue repairs is temporary, it's interrupted the unhurried rhythm of the beach town.

The ailing Hubble Space Telescope could be snapping pictures of the heavens again as early as Saturday after engineers fixed one of the problems that has largely shut down the instrument for the last three weeks. "We spent the last week reviewing," said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Systems Management Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Now we're ready to resume recovery."

It was a good news, bad news day for NASA on Thursday as space agency managers announced that they had successfully restarted the broken Hubble Space Telescope, but acknowledged that they won't be ready to send a repair team to the 18-year-old instrument until May at the earliest. After reactivating two cameras on Hubble, scientists beamed its first pictures to Earth since a glitch idled the telescope several weeks ago.

Spacewalking astronauts completed almost all of the greasy repairs on a gummed-up joint at the International Space Station on Saturday, leaving just a few chores for another day. As spacewalk No. 3 was getting underway 225 miles up, a new recycling system for converting urine and other wastewater into drinking water broke down again. It was the third day in a row that the processor inexplicably shut down, and it appeared to be the same kind of sluggish motor trouble seen before.

He was a boy when a Greek taught him the intricacies of the sewing machine. What was his name, that Greek? Yani Defarkas. Nice man, steady hands. That long time ago is mentioned the way a gray-haired man recalls how the job he took in his youth gradually became who he was. Kind of like thread, spooling, raveling. One day you're a kid with pricked fingers, the next you're an old guy with tweezers and a magnifying glass tinkering with the gadgetry of progress.

BY the time a musical instrument arrives at the Los Angeles Unified School District repair shop, it might be dented, cracked, scratched, bent, chipped, smashed, warped, jammed, gouged, rusted or snapped. It might be missing strings, keys, valves, hooks, hammers, springs, pads, paint, cork, felt or horsehair. Somebody might have carved "Tony {heart} Jenny" on its side. Maybe somebody kicked it or threw it. Maybe somebody used it as a club or bowled with it. Never heard of piano bowling?

Operators of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline hope a scraping device will push out a piece of metal 20 inches in diameter that's been missing in the pipeline since December. A pipeline cleaning device known as a scraper or paraffin pig broke apart inside the pipeline in December between pump stations just north of Fairbanks and near Delta Junction, about 100 miles to the south. Most of the pieces have been recovered, but a stainless steel ring that holds other pieces in place has not been found.