The Fine Things are Always Hand Made

Getting home from Willowbrook

First off, for those of you that I met or talked to at Willowbrook....well met, it was a fun meeting and I hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

Michele and I decided to head home Sat afternoon rather than stay another night since the weather was looking bad. About 8 pm, just south of Findlay, OH, we were directly hit by lightening in the car. At about 60 mph I had a total failure of all electrical systems. As we coasted off the road, the smell of burning insulation was incredible. The horn started to blow, the engine started to crank, smoke came from under the hood. We started to set our stuff out of the vehicle and I saw my tool box. With that, I managed to disconnect the battery and by the time the fire dept arrived, there was nothing but smoke and smell. I am afraid our '09 Dodge Nitro is toast...the electrical/electronics is slagged.

We are both ok...my son came and got us and we finally made it home about midnight. A far bigger adventure than I planned for the ARCI meet. My son took a picture of the antenna mount on the roof, the strike point. We may all play with electricity, but we have nothing on nature.

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Permalink Reply by Y2K Bruce on August 5, 2012 at 9:45am

Glad you and the Mrs made it home OK. Here is a photo of Kent and yours truly after Kent's very popular talk on the Scott company and their history and serial number records. It was a packed room and the fastest 1 hour I can remember.

Here is the Scott Acousticraft 16 I got from Kent on display in the contest room. We had WBBM playing on both it and Mike Feldt's 1920's battery set and his 6 speaker display. Ironically there was another identical set in the swap meet area sold by Art Bilski to a well known Ebay seller. 2 separate but identical Scotts

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Permalink Reply by Leonid Soloviev on August 6, 2012 at 5:39pm

Kent, what a story and what an adventure!

No jokes with nature... I've been once in a plane, hit by lightning...

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Permalink Reply by Bill Liers on August 8, 2012 at 6:25pm

Kent,

Glad you were unharmed. Too bad about the car, but it will be fun to buy a new one! A similar situation happened to us, we were hit by lightning in a freak thunderstorm that came upon us in a matter of minutes in central Pa. Absolutely nothing happened to the car except a mark on the hood and we drove home stunned and shaken. Lightning seems to be natures way of throwing the dice...