Head in the clouds

In my experience, unfortunately the majority of those who want to 'tinker' often don't have a clue and shouldn't be allowed to wield so much as a screwdriver. Messing with the instrument panel is fraught with danger for those types of people. It only takes a little lack of understanding and the next thing you have a wiring problem - for example a relocated ammeter, which carries the full current load of the aircraft, might end up with its wiring pulled a little tight perhaps, next thing the vibration has the insulation wearing against an earthed member - and Mr Tinker has a cabin fire on his hands at worst, or a blown fuse/circuit breaker at best. Even the best scenario is the first hole in the cheese lined up. The worst case is too scary to contemplate, an inflight cabin fire. Now that was all very well in the days when we only had single seaters and we all took our own chances with our soft pink flesh, but these days ol' tinker wants to take his unsuspecting mates and fillies for a jolly. Is that fair on them? Now, it might be that he managed to reconfigure the panel without too many problems, but where does it end? Should it be OK for him to add a heater system too, piping the 120C engine coolant through the firewall using some nice Bunnings clear PVC tube and an old oil cooler? Nothing wrong with something so minor is there, and imagine the comfort it'll bring to his passengers? Boiling liquid spraying through the cabin wouldn't be too bad after all, would it? Then ... well I even watched a friend, who DID build his Jabiru from a kit, who therefore was perfectly allowed to make modifications ... as he cut right through the mainspar carry-through in two places and removed a section of it so that he could mount a swing-down ipad up there. Sheeesh! At least as it is with no-one allowed to tinker with a factory-built LSA, subsequent owners have half a hope of buying an unadulterated aircraft that might carry them around with reasonable safety, but seriously, if anyone could make changes to their factory built, would you buy a used one? EDIT - if people are competent rather than tinkerers (and I'm not saying that everyone who wants to change something isn't competent - though many aren't) then why not get a kit to assemble the way they'd like it to be?

I vote for facthunter to run it!

I don't think you can legally make any changes to a factory built LSA without an Engineering Order, so you might just have to get used to it being like that.

And you wouldn't need it, of course. But I do hope, by your comment, that you're not suggesting that normal mortals who haven't the experience to enable their competition in aerobatics at international level, shouldn't use one. I can't imagine how I could have taught balanced flying to people without a wool-tuft or a ball to refer to when their bum 'didn't feel right'. Initially, because they're being pressed to one side or the other, or there's an airblast through a vent one side, students and low-hour pilots might well realise the aircraft isn't in balance, but those same people have a heap of trouble quickly determining to which side it is that they are out-of-balance - and even more so when they're under pressure. A quick glance at the wool or ball, and the ingrained rule of 'pull the string' or 'kick the ball' can have them flying safely far more quickly than trying to work out which buttock is aching, or which vent is blasting at them. No spray intended djp, I respect your comments more than virtually anyone's on here, but I do very much believe in the importance of a slip/skid indicator for 'normal' flyers. EDIT - love OK's one made by his daughter, we used to do similar with a s/s ball bearing, a bit of clear PVC tubing and baby oil, for a cheap version in the early ultralight days. BUT, I found an even better and cheaper version - most avionics repair shops have a number of Turn and Bank instruments that are not repairable and they keep them on the shelf just to have the bezels to sell for other repairs ... and THAT means the glass slip/skid vial can usually be bought for 10 bucks, then a bit of ingenuity to make a mounting and you have a quality instrument for peanuts! I love peanuts ;-) EDIT EDIT - Spin training ... I don't believe you can do better than your local gliding club for cost and value and safety. One session and you'll learn all you need to recover most situations safely, and more particularly, how to avoid getting into that situation in the first place. Today's cost? Probably less than $300, I'd imagine.

I still rather doubt all that ... whose analysis? The pound doesn't have to do any recovery at all, the fall in the Euro will/would have done the job for them. The currency market Tech and Sentiment both show a double whammy against the Euro. Merkel's woes are just one aspect that has the Euro likely to tumble a lot further, and the Sentiment of the whole of Europe is fearful now that they've come to terms with the UK not wanting to be a part of the EC anymore. The uncertainty is sure to push the Euro lower in the mid and longer term. That combination should have provided sufficient strength for Monarch to secure bridging if their lenders had confidence in their management. I'd agree that their vulnerability would seem to be lack of market spread, and that's an indication of management problems, that they haven't kept their business model up with modern trends.

I thought it looked familiar. I don't know anything about "May 1986, the Australian fitness Sports equipment company came to Nanjing to buy a AD100 aircraft", but around 1987 a delegation of Chinese travelled around parts of Oz touting this aircraft as being the fabulous new offering from China that was going to revolutionise the way we looked at sport/ultralight aircraft. Some of us were invited to the airstrip at Rambler's Drop Zone in Toogoolawah (Brisbane Valley, about 100km west of Brisbane) for a 'show and tell' day. They had the aircraft out of the trailer and assembled and trotted out their spiel which was very re-assuring, their test pilot said a few words too and then they were about to pack it all up again and several of us suggested we'd like to see it fly ... ya know? For some reason they were rather reticent about that, so being the gung ho type he was, my old mate Bazza (Barry Hughes - quite a few of you will have known him) talked his way into having a go in it. He completed one rather wobbly circuit and when he climbed out of it he declared how delighted he was to be safely back on the ground and that the thing was 'an absolute dog'. The Chinese delegation next headed south, to Canberra IIRC, and was never heard of again - not by any of us, anyway.

Suggesting that currency fluctuations caused this collapse is unlikely, there'll be a lot more to it than that. Any sound Company that has liabilities in an external currency will be hedging against fluctuations. Not only that but the GBP dip since Brexit is minor and has lately been in firm recovery. The GBP/USD pair stood at 1.4 at the time of the Brexit decision in June '16 and fell to 1.22 by October but since then has steadily strengthened to its current 1.34. If a 5% dip against the USD, whilst currently in firm recovery, was sufficient to send them under I'd suggest they were already seriously foundering through mismanagement, well before that. As far as the EUR/GBP pair is concerned, it stood at 0.8 at Brexit, spent most of the year around 0.84 and briefly reached 0.92 in August. However since Merkel's struggles it has fallen back to 0.88. Once again, only a 10% change that continues in recovery and would have been hedged against if the company was being run competently.

October 2nd 2017. A quick catch up on the DooMaw log, I hadn't realised how long it's been ... last time I posted about it was a couple of months ago when I had just started the fuel tank welding and made up the aly skins for the front of the fuselage. I machined up a sump for the bottom of the tank with the drain set below the outlet so that any condensed water can be separated, welded that in along with several other fittings for fuel gauge, return lines etc, and the filler assembly which is located in the bottom right corner of the windshield similar to the Wittman Tailwind. It's there because, being a taildragger, that's the highest point when at rest on the ground. I completed the tank welding and then installed the on/off tap on the tank outlet and sealed off the various other tank openings. Using a compressor I pressurised the tank via the valve and closed it off once the tank had assumed the shape of a Michelin Man. From previous experience a tank without baffles goes that shape at about 3-4psi. It's important that the ambient temperature doesn't change significantly during the pressure test because as it gets warmer the pressure increases and v.v. so that would mess up your results. The first part of the test involves sitting the tank's largest side (the top in my case) on a flat surface and measuring the deflection caused by the bulging. Alternatively, if it's easier you can lay a metre steel rule (or any straightedge) vertically over the surface of the tank. Then use a vernier to measure the extent of the bulging of the surface. In my case it was 37.4mm. I left it in a stable-temperature air-conditioned room for an hour and then measured again. 27mm this time - uhoh it looked like we had a problem. Of course it could be just a leak at the shut-off valve, or the filler cap, or any of the fittings and/or hoses that were closing off the various penetrations for fuel gauge lines, return lines etc. Out with the bubble liquid and a brush and an all-over test revealed nothing anywhere. That was a bit of a surprise so I increased the pressure again and went over it all again, still nothing. Dug out a large composting container and filled it with precious water from the tank (no town water here and it hasn't rained for ages) and immersed the tank one side at a time and found the leak, a tiny pinhole where the start of one weld run had overlapped the end of a previous one without fusing properly. It was visible when revealed but I'd not been able to pick it from the post-welding visual inspection. A few seconds of welding later and the tank held pressure for six hours with no deflection change so I scoured the surfaces and painted it with etch primer. Two things worth noting about finding leaks using a waterbath - first, don't try and do it by immersing the tested weld too deep or the water pressure can exceed the low pressure in the tank and the air won't leak out, and second always put the flat surface being tested at an angle, not exactly flat, so that any bubbles from a leak on the underside run up the surface before coming to the surface, that gives tiny micro-bubbles time to join together and form larger bubbles which will be visible whereas the micro-bubbles can be very hard to spot. I made up the 3mm aly straps to mount the tank, had to modify the original cleats I'd fitted to the fuselage, a bit of touch-up paint and then installed the tank. Following that I could re-visit the plywood floors which needed a bit of trimming to get them in since I'd added a lot of cleats and fittings inside the fuselage since I originally made the floors. Then four more coats of water-based Cabothane Clear (great stuff that is!), installed the Rivnuts and screwed the floor down. Then I could start to look at the installation of the pedals before wifey reckoned winter was over and it was time to anti-foul our little sailboat and get it back in the water, hence the long delay since last post. Today is a public holiday and cloudy weather not at all conducive to messing about in boats so I'll be scouring the fuselage skins ready for a coat of etch primer. A few pics - Another 59hrs in that lot, making a total of 1662hrs so far.

Some excellent information there, thanks Brian! Just too late for me though, I completed the pressure testing of my tank a few weeks ago and have now installed it, so hopefully my method was suitably efficacious, time will tell I guess, when I first fill it up! By the way folks, some of you will have seen posts in another thread which reveal that BrianG is now the Australasian Rep for Oratex covering products. Since I am planning on using Oratex for DooMaw I had a long and very rewarding chat with Brian a few days ago, and he proves to be a most interesting conversationalist and all-round very knowledgeable fella. I highly recommend that anyone looking at a fabric covering exercise in the future get in touch with Brian via his website Wheelerswings ... but before doing that read your way through the website because there's a wealth of info about the product on there. Also, watch some of the videos and see how easy it is to apply, I was fascinated that the water-based paint-on-and-let-it-dry adhesive is activated at a lower temperature than the fabric shrinks, so you use a temperature controlled heat gun set below the fabric shrink temperature to get the fabric stuck on - and you can stick and unstick it to get rid of any wrinkles - then when it's all to your satisfaction you increase the heat of the gun or iron to tension the fabric. Simples! Even more amazing ... when you've got it all nice and tight you flail away at it with the sharp end of a claw hammer to show yourself just how damage resistant this stuff is - true! It's all in the video ... Another great tip from Brian is that the Oratex 6000, which is the heavier fabric (Oratex 600 for aircraft up to 600kg MTOW, Oratex 6000 for aircraft up to 6000kg) is only about 20% heavier, so for a bush plane which might get its tailfeathers dragged through the scrub on occasions, or have sharp stones flicked up by the tyres, you could happily use the (slightly) heavier fabric on vulnerable surfaces. And ... Brian is building a Fisher Flying Products Dakota Hawk. They're a truly lovely side-by-side two seater, all timber with geodetic construction for the wings and timber truss for the fuselage. Anyone considering building their own plane and who likes working with timber should have a good look at the Dakota Hawk. The plans are readily available and apparently very well drawn and complete, and there are some excellent build logs around (here's a great example of one being built by a lady in the USA) that would be a great help to anyone building their own. Perhaps we could persuade BrianG to document his build here? I'd love to see and read about the progress of another build. Brian is considering installing the D Motor, which I think is an excellent choice.

Hi Marty, actually the gun doesn't have to go on the rivet head, even with universal head rivets. I saw your plea for help previously and was going to send you my rivet tools but don't have them as small as 1/8", mine start from 5/32". Anyway, see the image below - and what you need for the rounded rivet heads, if you want to hammer the stem, or press it in a shop press, is the small tool shown to the right. I'm not sure what they're called but you drill a 3/16" hole in a piece of heavy steel plate and sit the stem of the tool in the hole and the rivet head in the dimple then hammer or press the stem of the rivet.

Hi Chasco, welcome to the forum. I remember Max Kremke well and I was very taken by the Staggerbipe, back then it was well ahead of its time. I'm pretty certain it was displayed unfinished at Mangalore in 1984 and the picture and write up about it in Berger-Burr's 'Ultralight and Microlight Aircraft of the World' 2nd Edition (first published 1985), confirms that. In fact the photo of it in onetrack's link in the post above is Rob Fox's photo taken at Mangalore '84 for that publication. I recall that Max originally had it on a composite landing gear spring that proved too soft and I think it was after that he substituted the CRMO gear legs, so it's quite possible I also saw it at Mangalore '83 on that composite gear. I was very interested in the Staggerbipe and so kept my ear to the ground about its development, and although I was very involved in the whole ultralight movement until the early 1990s I never heard anything about it being completed or being flown, sadly. That's not to say it didn't happen, information promulgation prior to the internet wasn't so good, especially between WA and the Eastern States.

If you've inadvertently handled the stuff you'd want to scrub up plenty and go onto a high vitamin C and iodine rich diet for a month or two, with bioflavinoids and Rubin A. Alternatively you can lick your fingers and shrug it off, as many have done before ...

Then it's recommended to avoid touching it unless you're wearing disposable gloves ...

Based on that it seems there's no doubt that you need to aim off-centre for a tree if you're going to crash ... BUT, if planes start inexplicably 'veering' when you're 80, I think I'll be hanging up the headset well before that.

It comes in green and yellow. The yellow is the colour in the previous images. It should be applied in a very thin coat or it will usually peel off rather than chemically etch and meld with the surface. In the images above the colour is quite typical of yellow ZC when applied with very low viscosity i.e. with plenty of thinners. Not saying it's definitely not Alodine but 25 years ago I think a lot more people were using ZC than Alodine. You can still buy ZC from trade suppliers, because it's probably still the best anti-corrosion treatment for aly but they've made it less readily available to Joe Public because of the health concerns. I think it's mainly the lead, chromium and aromatics that are the carcinogens so gloves and cartridge filters or positive pressure masks are essential when handling it. Google "Zinc Chromate MSDS" and there will be plenty of links to both of the colours and their relative toxicities.

I don't think that's Alodine. It looks much more like Zinc Chromate primer which was in widespread use for aluminium airframes until a couple of decades ago. ZC lost popularity when it was found to be quite highly carcinogenic. Gloves and positive pressure breathing apparatus should be employed when applying it and treated parts (even old ones) shouldn't be handled without gloves. Edit - there's also a Milspec product that was produced to replace ZC, it looks similar so it might be that.

If it was anything like previous years' outcomes, the scrubber won both ...

It depends a lot on how the plane is loaded at the time. With a CG near the aft limit it's fine, but with a forward CG you can run out of elevator authority at quite a high airspeed if you don't have the elevator in propwash. In that case it's not so much that it stalls at a higher speed, in fact it doesn't reach the stall at all, but the nose will drop even with full up elevator. Different flap settings will affect it too ...

Erm ... when did the rules change? You've always been permitted to learn in a plane you built yourself (only the owner/builder(s), no-one else). The only difficulty in the case of some planes, has been to find an instructor willing to get in it with you. That's mainly been the case with self-designed and built aircraft rather than ones that are kit-built or have been scratch-built to recognised plansets.

Great post OK. Can you imagine the following happening here? .... all designed to help you ‘be in the now’. At school, days begin and end with a short ceremony, where greetings are exchanged and the day’s events are announced. Before and after each class, students and teacher stand, bow and thank each other. And before starting the lesson, students are asked to close their eyes to focus their concentration. And - I adopted the business card thing when I heard about that one fifteen or so years ago. Peoples' reaction is sometimes quite astounding, and it's opened a few doors for me that might have remained firmly closed otherwise.

Avoid flying when it's windy?

Well ... my wife and I booked a few days ago and had been very much looking forward to seeing it today, and I must say we were very disappointed. I really considered leaving around the half way mark but did see it through to the end, and even managed to stay awake - just. Frankly I thought the way the story-line was dealt with - endless repeats of the same event but showing the ways it was seen through different peoples' eyes - was just plain boring. I certainly didn't have any complaints about the realism of the 'noise and shock' of war, in my mind it beat all other war movies in that single respect. The dog-fighting was unconvincing, it appeared more like an effortless and leisurely Sunday afternoon fly. Clearly no-one on the advisory team had ever bothered to take a jolly in a warbird to get an idea of what's actually involved. And the Spitfire that ran out of fuel at about 1000ft, then glided to the coast, shot down a Stuka conducting dive-bombing, and spent the next 7 minutes of screen time gliding along beach after beach without losing any height ... yeah, right! I blamed myself for the disappointment, since I took the word of the promoters that it was 'one of the best war movies ever produced', and I hadn't actually read the reviews. So I did that when I got home and found it wouldn't have made any difference, the general concensus is that this movie's something special. I must be getting old and jaded I guess. 2/5 is my rating.

... there are also unscrupulous sites which offer scans of plans for $10 or less

Well ... it's great that the title's been changed but rather unfortunate that the new title is just as nondescript as the previous one. Downunder suggested we try to use a common format which makes a LOT of sense - " there needs to be a standard format. "aircraft type", "incident type", "location", "date" ".