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Head in the clouds

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Everything posted by Head in the clouds

  1. Head in the clouds
    My Shorai LiFe battery has been in a box under the house for the last four years awaiting the completion of DooMaw. Amazing battery - when I packed it up it was fully charged at 14.4V, I dug it out about a month ago because the engine is in now and I'm building the panel - and it's lost hardly any charge, it's still 14.2V. Treated like that, most lead-acid types would have reached the stage whether they might not take a charge again, at all.
  2. Head in the clouds
    It is a plastic nut. And mine is also a helicopter helmet with the single plug but like many of us that fly both we just have a converter cable where the single plug plugs into a single female inline socket with a short cable to double male plugs that suit the aeroplane configuration.
  3. Head in the clouds
    Yes, and also the type of ground makes a massive difference, some ground anchors being much better than others in different types of ground. Not many of them are much good at all in sand, but those spade types are not bad. And combining three pegs as onetrack mentioned in post #6 makes them hold many times better than used singly - Wet ground is surprisingly bad. You can screw the screw types in fine but the jiggling of a plane rocking in the wind pops them out effortlessly, same with the claw.
  4. Head in the clouds
    The Gentex style helmet (like that one) has to be one of the most developed of all flying helmets. As I understand it, it started out many years ago as the standard issue US Navy pilot helmet and consequently was 'tested and developed' in numerous landing mishaps on (and off) carriers by fast jets and helicopters, as well as during high-speed ejections. I have one and used it during my years helicopter mustering and must say it's extremely comfortable when flying for long hours each day, far better than flying with a headset. Inside the kevlar/glass shell is a medium density styrofoam liner and inside that is the leather and webbing suspension liner which holds the helmet clear of your head, that liner is adjustable for a good fit . In an event where the helmet impacts something the suspension liner should keep your head away from the styro liner and the shell except in the severest instance. Normally the visor would be down (clear or tinted) in which case the star shaped nut is not in the position shown in the picture above. I think it would be very unlikely, or an exceptionally unlucky chance that it were ever to protrude through the helmet, especially not far enough to reach the head. If it did, I think the occupant would have many more much more severe injuries, so the nut might be the last of his worries.
  5. Head in the clouds
    Trying to get one started screwing into the ground is a joke. And if the ground is soft enough so that it does screw in, get your 5 year old to rock the plane and watch it work its way out again.
  6. Head in the clouds
    Yes, it's the angled head that makes them clever because the pull is off axis to the main shaft of the peg. However they do have to be heat treated high tensile carbon steel (heat treated after original shaping). If they were mild steel like ordinary tent pegs they would just bend, both when being hammered in and also when the load is applied. They're actually very easy to pull out when you want to, you just slip a loop of rope under the angled part (to the bend near the main shaft) and hook the hammer through the other end of the loop and use it as a 'pull' hammer, a couple of whacks and out they come.
  7. Head in the clouds
    I just realised that for some reason they don't come up when you Google 'Scout Pegs'. They look like the image shown below and must be made from heat treated high tensile steel. The reason they work so well (on a power to low weight basis) is that the pull on the rope tied to the eye is off-axis to the line of the peg, so it's not trying to pull it out of the ground, it's trying to push it sideways through the ground - clever concept. The Claw type above work very well too. Ian - I guess people might not have known you stock them, I'm sure dsam wouldn't have meant any offence ... As a suggestion perhaps where you have the Clear Prop store advert/link, maybe you could have a slideshow constantly rotating the products you sell? Just so that people become familiar with what you have available.
  8. Head in the clouds
    They'd work, but heavy to carry around and very difficult to retrieve from hard or sticky ground and requires carrying a heavy hammer to set them.This question comes up regularly and the frequent answers are the various types of angled pegs through a plate with angled holes - see surefoot anchors for an example - which pull out easily from wet ground, or the corkscrew types which are impossible to wind into hard ground. The Scouts solved the problem 50yrs ago in USA - Google Scout Pegs - for a 600kg class plane they need to be 400mm long and 10mm high tensile steel. Longer to hold well in dry sand.
  9. Head in the clouds
    It's funny how people in the north become so parochial about their particular patch of it. When I was in Australia's 'proper' north we used to think of you Cairnsians as 'Southerner Softies'
  10. Head in the clouds
    He's a friend of mine, I'll send you an email tomorrow.
  11. Head in the clouds
    15 litres unusable? i.e. 37% seems a bit much. Maybe you meant 1.5lts? I agree about pumping up to the top tank and feeding the engine from there, that's how my Drifter was. My main concern is the pressure in the bottom tank. If the top feeds unrestricted to the bottom tank then when the top tank is full there's a head of about 700ml, that's quite a tall tank so the internal pressure in the lower tank will be quite high. Then apply 6G and you're looking at a head of 6x700 = 4.2m! Those belly tank tops are just glued to the bottom half and I don't think they were ever intended to take that kind of pressure. You'd want to use 'very' decent fuel lines and connectors too, for the same reason. And any bulging of the lower tank could break the mounting straps or their attachments. At the least, it would pay to pressure test the system by filling both tanks and also filling a 4m high tube connected to the breather perhaps and check that the bottom tank can take the pressure.
  12. Head in the clouds
    Yes, it's the standard way of determining the head/make-up rate of a borehole.
  13. Head in the clouds
    You won't find a lot of difference between the Eastwood Tyro and Col Winton's Jackeroo and his Cricket and then there's Werner Becker's Blue Max and quite a bunch of others. I think Winton was the first to use the general concept (apart from Demoiselle of course) - but using the Alcan rectangular 6061 T6 section for the fuselage. After a while John McCarron took the general design and got Bill Whitney to engineer it carefully and they came up with the Bush Cocky, a very much more refined version. The Thruster and the Kestrel are others that came about in the same era and which are loosely similar, not that any of them, except John McCarron, would admit to knowing of any of the others prior.
  14. Head in the clouds
    I don't know of any of the reinforcing fibres that aren't fire resistant, it's the resins that burn.
  15. Head in the clouds
    Hi Hippo, Welcome. Kwanza (Cuanza?), does that put you on the southern outskirts of Luanda? Or further down towards Benguela? I spent 17 years in Zim before it was Zim and a little time in SA. I think the west coast would be fascinating flying country with a good bush plane. Tell us more ...
  16. Head in the clouds
    That's the best suggestion I could think of too - in my experience you'd be hard-pressed to find a more helpful and supportive couple of fellas than those at Bolly.
  17. Head in the clouds
    Except that he was the dealer/factory builder ... is there a reason for this rank? Perhaps we'll learn more soon enough ...
  18. Head in the clouds
    There's no proving period for a factory build.
  19. Head in the clouds
    So sad to hear. Tragic news. RIP John and Gerald, and sincerest condolences to family and friends.
  20. Head in the clouds
    Well, there are a lot of anomalies in that so called history. In places I think they confuse 101.55 with 95.25 and 95.55, but whatever ... I think the height was lifted to 5000ft shortly after the HORSCOTS report came out, which was in 1987, in fact I think the height was lifted with the release of 101.55 (or was it 95.55??) in early 1988, to allow legal two seat training at a sensible height. But there was certainly a lot of confusion about it. Perhaps in reality it was only legal to fly two seaters higher, and 95.10 were still at 500ft. Not many complied with it anyway, as you said. Certainly, in accordance with the first Ops Manual, which came out in 1986 when Bill Dinsmore was employed as the first Ops Manager, in our schools we were required to operate training flights at 'above 500ft, below 5000ft'. I completed Bill's course at Toogoolawah in 1987 after which my interim CFI Approval was finally ratified. He even took us up for incipient spin training in a Lightwing!
  21. Head in the clouds
    I think your dates are a bit out. The 500ft rule was lifted to 5000ft with the release of 95.10 Rev2 which IIRC came out in 1984/5. By 1986 95.25 two seat trainers, Gemini, Lightwing and Drifter, were in use and they had never been limited to 500ft.
  22. Head in the clouds
    I see only one comment regarding the Flightline 760A VHF (derekliston post #15) - they seem to be one of the smallest and certainly the least costly - anybody have any other comments about them?
  23. Head in the clouds
    They all fade, yellow is probably the worst, at least that's what custom car restorers will tell you about colours in general, dacron sails seem to confirm that. Fluoro pink is pretty bad too. But - if you use Armorall or Protectant 303 copiously and regularly i.e. a whole 750ml bottle on the top surfaces, half a bottle on the undersides, every three months, the colours will not fade noticeably and the fabrics will last at least 15yrs (or much longer), assuming you used quality fabric in the first place. Without using a UV protectant they last (safely) about 4yrs if hangared, half that if not. That's based on experience with UV conditions in Queensland.
  24. Head in the clouds
    That's 61,322 hours for the log so far, then. It shows the big difference between scratch built and kit built!
  25. Head in the clouds
    Interesting article just found on Bush Flyers down Under, about the media's poor journalistic performance on the Hawkesbury Beaver crash - Plane Truths and Knee-jerk Reporting
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