Bruce Tuncks

RF guy, lots of us would like for you to be on the raaus board. I do know of a Jabiru forced landing near Broken Hill. The engine threw an exhaust valve. Since this would rarely happen instantly, I asked the pilot ( I knew him ) about the compressions on the turnover test that morning. He had never heard of this test. Apparently some older instructors, used to impulse mags, (which a Jabiru does not have ) think it is too dangerous to turn an engine and don't teach it or do it themselves.

I too would like to know much more about the engine failure. At the beginning of the take-off run, you know that you have 2 working ignition systems and 2 fuel pumps. AND your engine, if DI'd according to the makers, had compressions on all 4 cylinders. How could the engine have failed ?

Well guys you did so well that I have another picture to trace.... this one is taken just south of Heavitree gap, and it shows a mounted policeman and about 8 shackled aborigines on foot. The date would have been about 1900 but this is just another guess. The policeman might have been sgt stott, but I don't know. In the background, there is the old police station which guarded the gap. The caption for the pic read " Cattle thieves being taken to court" which was in Port Augusta at the time. I reckon it was impossible for that lot to reach Port Augusta, so I would love to see the pic again and hear the full story. On this picture, I contacted the NT archives but they were unable to help.

I remember the Calder name, I reckon there was a girl in school with that name. All the rest agrees with what I remember, and the "crash" might well have been an old one. These days, the airfield at Hermannsburg is disused, I last saw it with shrubs growing in the gravel. The place is only about 45km from Alice Springs,most of it on bitumen, and a car is a better transport option these days. Eddie Connellan could have ignored the government but they were paying for his operation with their mail contracts. .

Thanks guys.... no I don't know the date.... it was when I had my first job ever, folding up the centralian advocate newspaper. I would have been too young in 1948 , so that was the basis for my guess. And yes, the Dragon-Rapide was grossly underpowered, especially for the hot and high airfields we had then. It was nice of you onetrack to say how it was a rational decision to insist on pommy planes at that time. I reckoned it was because Robert Menzies was an Anglophile and he got rewarded by all the imperial honours you could imagine. BUT i knew this guy who told me that the DH dragon-Rapide was the best plane he had ever flown, and he had flown spitfires. I wish everything was easier sometimes.

I have tried for years to get a copy of a picture I saw as a kid in Alice Springs. Just lately, I have found that a dragon-rapide VH-BKM crashed on take-off at hermannsburg but no date was given. I don't think anybody was killed. The pilot may have been Sam Calder of Alice Springs. The plane belonged to Connellan Airways. I sure would appreciate any help finding out more. The picture I remember shows a broken but unburned dragon at Hermannsburg.

Using the radio properly was what I couldn't remember.

SO.... if you do the right things ( Fly above 500 ft except landing and take-off, don't fly out of glide-range of a landable field, don't run out of fuel, do proper maintenance, and some other stuff i can't think of ) what is the risk compared with driving a car?

One of my pet gripes is how hard it is to find just what the active ingredient is on something like that cleaner from Supercheap. I am only slightly chemically challenged, and one day I worked at finding just what the chemistry of flue cleaners was. It turned out that the cheap ones were common salt and the expensive ones were an aluminium salt. Some said that putting old ( emptied!) beer cans in the fire was just as good. A current problem is this: Is it necessary to use a glycol-based coolant in your car if it never gets frozen or near boiling? And why? Anyway, thanks onetrack for telling us that the supercheap stuff works good.

It sure sounds like you have been running avgas on that engine and also controlling the cht's too well. The combined effect is to have lead and gunk deposits like that.

Aircraft might just be the ideal fit for hybrid systems. The take-off and climb-out use a great deal of the energy and the cruise a lot less. So a setup where electric assist helps with the high-load bits makes sense to me.

Years ago, a guy published how he filled his wing-tanks from a 44 gallon drum ( mounted on a sack-truck ) by pumping air into the drum. Well the safety complaints were deafening ! So I like skippy's idea, but in the meantime the hand-pump will do. We have the drums on a wheeled base to easily push them around. Thee worst bit is taking the full drums off the trailer. We use a pair of aluminium ramps for this but the drum is just real heavy. Any ideas would be appreciated... it is not an option for us to get the big tanker truck to come to the airfield just for us.

You need a kit which is advertised by Munich Motorcycles au. They sell for both the 40mm and 32mm cv carbs. The older Jabirus used a 32mm carb . Once you have the kit, any decent place should be able to do the job. I recommend that you study it up and then do the job yourself. You can test the results out on the ground.

I was amazed and impressed how CBC bearings tracked down a Libelle bearing for me. These bearings may have been common in Germany in the 60's but they were hard to find now in Australia.

RF guy, I reckon $120/sqm is about right but too much. That's $12,000 for a ten by ten m slab. The first savings would be thinner concrete ( 3") with more sub-base compaction. The posts about earth flooring are interesting, You will need to consider if you are going to do engine work in the hangar.

I agree. You need a new optician. Best wishes.

Wow that arch hangar is really impressive. There would be a span where the arch became economical compared with galv. I reckon though that a shed-type hangar of about 12m span would be cheapest when the doors etc were all added in. At Gawler, many of us owned tee hangars, but these were replaced with standard sheds by the contractor. My guess is that the labor component was higher for tee hangars. DOORS.... Sliders are difficult to get to work easily and reliably, I prefer bi-fold swinging doors but be careful

yep onetrack... once this happened near burra... i was trying to meet with a mate to glide home together. " where are you? "I'm under that nice big cu just over the town" " what height ?" " 7000 ft and climbing" Well I never could find him... the sky is REALLY BIG.

Yenn, it is not just the moisture from the concrete. You can have a hydrologic cycle in a shed, with the rain condensing on the inner steel sheet and the moisture source being the earth. I have actually seen this happen. The poor plane owner was scratching his head trying to work out why his asi was half full of water.

Steel ( ie a shed) should be the cheapest. Commercial sheds are about twice the materials cost, but they include specially formed bits. I've done " back to back" farm sheds which are as strong. If you do this, don't exceed the spans as shown by a commercial job, but I don't advise an inexperienced guy to go this way. You really need an engineer to check the design and this will ruin the savings. By all means get a quote from a tilt-slab guy before you sign up tho. Personally, I would avoid a tilt-slab but then I have no experience with them. My hangar here( now used as just a shed) only had a 2" floor slab. But it did have plastic underneath . I did it in 2 parts.... first, the end-wall bits and the center bit, both about 300mm wide. Then the remaining bits were filled and screeded off. there was the cheapest reinforcing steel in there too, So what if a load causes tiny cracks? these will mainly be on the underside and will not matter. If you neglect Jab 7252's advice about plastic, you may create a nasty wet environment for your plane. The sub-slab soil preparation is important too. A road-base would be good, 150mm deep and rubble well compacted down .

These days, I close it as soon as possible, which is after only about 30 seconds.

Once, I flew the jabiru with the choke inadvertently left on. It was not till I descended rapidly to stay clear of a cloud that the engine gave a strange response to the throttle and made me realize. Of course, I would be the only person here to have forgotten to close the choke.

I used to find it amazing that old guys were not more active as hit men. But now I'm old, I see that inside yourself, you are just the same as ever and so just as scared of dying... its stupid I know. Getting back to over-governance, I find myself reluctantly agreeing with turbs. We need to go with a thought-out plan to the right pollies to show them how to save money and appear to be just as tough on terrorists. Personally, I would think that taking these people back from Syria was a great chance to do a deal that they could be allowed back if they dispensed with the face-covering stuff and other signs that they would never integrate. Alas, they find it easier to pick on us poor pilots... If only, think I, those 9/11 guys had used trucks instead of planes.

In the Jabiru, the engine will not start if you have the throttle open and try and use the choke. If you try to put it away too soon, the engine stops. You need to run it for about 20 seconds before you can shut down the choke.

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is what we have forgotten. There are dark forces out there which would change us into another Russia if we let them. We already have a lot of our wealth in the hands of oligarchs and we are daily giving more power to police for the illusion of safety, not realizing that it is excessive police powers we should be scared of.