IBob

Not quite: end of 2021, the notification says.......

Peter Gillespie (the Australian ICP agent) tells me that he is able to supply the 3 point door latch kits. Price is A$265 inc GST plus postage. He has them made up as required. His email is petergillespie4@bigpond.com This is the kit I installed, it is well made and works fine when properly set up.

A recent incident here in NZ involved an automotive oil thermostat on a 912, which reportedly failed and cut off oil flow to the engine. Fortunately, this happened on startup on the ground and the engine was promptly stopped. If I were considering an oil thermostat, I would be sourcing one that cannot fail in this fashion: as I recall, there is one advertised for the 912, and the manufacturer specifically states it cannot cut off the oil flow if it fails.

Mark: I've emailed Peter to ask if he or anyone is now making them. My thought was, if not, then maybe publish the design for the benefit of others?

Bent rod end: Mark, is anyone over there now supplying those door closer kits?

Okay. With my setup, I 'adjusted' the tang on the door handle by modifying the bend in it until the door there closed well, but not too tightly. Then the rods that close front and back have a chamfer on the end of them: I also bent the very tips of these to effectively give a greater chamfer at the tip, so that they pick up their locating holes without the need to pull the door in tightly. It was a matter of working round these closing points, but once I had them adjusted, they work fine. Finally, when operating the door handle, I don't pull in at the end of the handle. I place fingers behind the handle centre and pull in there (otherwise pulling on the handle just flexes the whole handle sideways). I explain this to passengers and we have no trouble closing the doors. I also have rubber seals, as Mark suggested (though I can't claim to get an airtight seal).

Why is it hard to close when seated???

Looks fantastic, Mark! What is the paint system?

I bought the system that attaches to the existing handle to (also) provide slide bolts (rods) front and rear. Works well enough after a bit of fiddling to set up. No difficulty working when seated. Was supplied by the Australian agent, Reg Brost, when I bought my kit from him. I believe he had them made up. However, the Oz dealership has now changed hands, and I don't know if the kit is now available. Wouldn't be hard to make.

I don't know. But I'll ask the locals what and why the next time I run into them.

Are you on level strips, Student Pilot.........or steep uphill ones?

Someone told me that the original design was intended for crop spraying (liquid, rather than solids), but that the wing did not lay down a good wet pattern, which is how it came to be sold on to the NZ manufacturer. I don't know if this is true. There was also the story of someone who picked up several of these aircraft for next to nothing: Some of these pilots used to travel the world with the seasons, perhaps they still do...wheat crops in the UK, then down to the cotton in the Nile delta and so on. The story went that one of the Arab countries had bought several Fletchers, a local pilot had killed himself in one, and the remaining local pilots then refused to fly them. So they were parked near the end of a runway, and about to be bulldozed during runway widening/extensions when a visiting pilot offered to take them away instead.............

I believe the turbine also allows them to make a faster approach, then put the prop into beta on touchdown if required: that's certainly how they put down at the airfield at the end of the day. Then many strips are sloping, so the speed washes off quickly once on the ground, and it's not unusual to be applying power again to get the aircraft back up to the loader.

Oh, that's excellent: I lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve those off the edge takeoffs....................)

When I came to NZ in the '70s they were using DC3s and Beavers. I was fortunate to go with a friend a couple of times in a Beaver, had another session booked but he rung me and told me not to come out. Weather no good, I asked, nope, he said, I just wrote her off. The strip that day was along a ridge top, he had missed his line on takeoff and gone off the side with insufficient speed. You could see where he started to dump the load, but the reality is the super doesn't come out that fast: imagine sand pouring out of a hole in the bottom of a bucket, it takes time. You could see where the L undercarriage hit and tore off. Then the gouges made by the prop, with the RH undercarriage a little further on. The rest was in a fence at the bottom of the gully. The Beaver fuel tank is in the belly, so lucky it didn't burn. Back up on the ridge, you could easily see how it might happen: the land appeared to fall away just about equally on all sides, with no clear indicator of the line. Apparently they would normally follow the wheel marks of the arrival landing, but that morning there had been no dew and the ground was dry. I never did manage to go topdressing in a DC3, but I once begged a ride in the copilot seat from Napier to Taupo, and it remains one of the most enjoyable and memorable flights of my life.

Just nipped out in the garden and took a pic of our most-used local strip, 2.3km away. The super bin is silhouetted at the top right against the trees on the hilltop. The strip comes down very steeply to the left of there, then less steeply towards it's lower end: only the steep upper part, coming towards the camera, is clear in this pic. This strip sees a huge amount of use each summer. Mostly what they are putting on is lime, to address a deficiency. A couple of summers ago they must have been working close in, and I timed them at 2minute turnarounds, wheels off to wheels off. They work very long days when weather permits. And it is dangerous: more so than forestry, which otherwise tops the list here.

The foiling sailboat performances are certainly outrageous. Having said that, the dynamics, or mechanics, or physics, or whatever we should call it......of the foiling sailboat speeds are a completely different thing than what is going on with this downwind land-yacht. None of the foiling sailboats, regardless of how refined, will go directly downwind at or faster than the wind speed.

Seems I stuffed up the format of my first post here: "In the case of something like an engine, I think I would be keeping it warm, but also shrouding it somehow to avoid constant air circulation." was supposed to be at the end.

I should add that I noticed parts from my build sometimes 'sweating' on the shelves in my workshop. This was particularly the case with the aluminium prop extension and the wheels, both of which are solid aluminium turnings or castings. The process here was that those parts cooled overnight, but due to their large thermal mass, were slow to warm up as the day warmed up. So as the day warmed, those parts remained colder than the ambient air, and condensation would occur, just like a cold glass of beer: the sweating occurred not overnight, but in the mornings as the ambient air temp began to climb. I was able to fix that by moving those heavier parts to higher shelves, so keeping them warmer. I also improved the seal around the workshop door to reduce the ingress of air.

F10, I have done a lot of refrigeration control work in freezing works. Vegans should look the other way at this point. A particular area of difficulty was the marching beam chillers, where the carcases come off the killing chain warm and wet and are fed along a progressively chilled room to age then reduce biological action. The steady stream of carcases is constantly bringing moisture into the room, and the walls and ceiling at the intake end would stream with condensation for a couple of hours after each shift start. This is a meat hygiene nono, so we had people in there with squeegies etc trying to control it. At one particularly bad plant we tried all sorts of things: extra fans blowing air various ways, a low temp refrig coil at the front end to strip moisture. Improvement was minimal. Then one day I was talking with a visiting eng and he said 'You will only get condensation where the surface is colder than the ambient air". I thought about that, then programmed an especially long hot defrost of the refrig gear at the front of the room, timed to occur before start of shift. In the case of something like an engine, I think I would be keeping it warm, but also shrouding it somehow to avoid constant air circulation. And the condensation vanished. By hot defrosting the intake area prior to startup, we were warming the walls and ceiling, so no condensation took place when the moisture began to arrive. And thereafter the walls and ceiling would go to ambient air temperature, so still no condensation. So, the best way to avoid condensation is to keep the air dry. But if you can't do that, another option is to keep equipment warm.

Yep, that's a curly one to get the head around......)

Oops, wrong forum, sorry.

RFguy, what possible benefit would it be to China or Australia to go to war? Clearly China is the next boogyman in the sad and endless list of US boogymen used to maintain the necessary national paranoia, so justifying their defence spending and foreign policies....but that don't mean the rest of us have to buy into it............

Fair comment, Skippy, and if you are manually logging readings, that would seem to take care of that part of the argument. But I wonder how many do that (I can't say that I am actively logging values). And then we have (and will always have) pilots with very varying degrees of knowledge regarding the operation of engines. A well set up alarm system and a check of values at service intervals could be a real benefit for those less focused on the mechanics than you are. To be clear, I was referring only to engine monitoring and there are cost effective compact units to do that for the 912.