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Marty_d

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Everything posted by Marty_d

  1. Marty_d
    I escaped the family yesterday and spent a very pleasant hour exploring Ballarat airfield and doing some plane watching. Unfortunately the aviation museum is only open weekends and public holidays, neither of which coincide with our visit, but there were a gaggle of C172's doing circuits, several Air Tractors, a nice little RANS taildragger, Foxbat, Skyfox, Beech V35 and others. A very sad looking De Havilland Dove sans tail sits behind the aviation museum (hopefully being restored?) In one hangar I could see a bloke polishing a very nice looking Ryan with enclosed cabin and radial engine, but I didn't have my phone with me at that point so missed the picture. A C206 on floats landed at one point, swapped passengers then took off again. Seemed like a very nice airfield. There's a bunch of what looks like WWII wooden barracks nearby, all with different signs - the Morris Minor club, woodworking club, etc... so much nicer than being surrounded by concrete factory outlets - but given the road and construction work going on nearby, that too is inevitable.
  2. Marty_d
    I can do the math, but the bit about HOW it costs 1.23m to build is beyond me.
  3. Marty_d
    Hi all, I'm in Ballarat this week on holiday with the family. Wednesday and Friday are booked out, but Thursday I could possibly sneak out with the car in search of aviation related activity. Anyone in the area have a build, or a finished aircraft, that I could come and drool over? (Not literally. And if I did I'd wipe it up.) Cheers, Marty
  4. Marty_d
    All that and they crash in test flying (because of the use of aforementioned BunnAero parts).
  5. Marty_d
    Hold on, $400k plus for a Rotax 912 powered amphibian and they're making a loss of $830k per aircraft? How does that work?
  6. Marty_d
    I was an R/C builder - and did a few original designs, all of which flew, some briefly but the later ones well. In fact I had a shed cleanout a year or so ago and took a couple of my planes to the tip. The wings were damaged so I broke them up, but just threw the fuselages out as is (minus engines and radio gear). I was in the tip shop the other day, had a wander round outside, and blow me down - there's one of my fuselages sitting out in the weather with $30 price tag on it! They're dreaming, it's covered balsa with a nosewheel and no wing. I just gave a box of R/C engines (0.25ci to 0.90ci) to the neighbour who's letting me park the 701 in his shed. His boys are into aircraft, rocketry and all the good stuff. Mine aren't unfortunately - I must have made planes uncool.
  7. Marty_d
    Both the Harrier and F4 Phantom (and probably many others) have HS with so much anhedral that they're almost an inverted swallow tail. Tail strike would be an issue, but with this particular aircraft the position of the prop itself is also a worry!
  8. Marty_d
    But how many times did a giant woman wrap herself around your plane?
  9. Marty_d
    Ukraine has been reading Bruce Tunk's posts.
  10. Marty_d
    Yep. If it weren't for all the powerlines you could take off down that strip of road, it'd be a nice gravity assist! Funny thing is it's a dead end with only a couple of houses above the new location. You'd think that the chances of another vehicle on a Sunday afternoon would be remote. But no, park a trailer on the road and start unloading it, sure fire way for a car to come up - plus a bloke walking his dog snapping pics on his mobile of a plane being delivered! (There's an idea. Should have wrapped it in cardboard with "Amazon" written on it.)
  11. Marty_d
    Good one. I'd forgotten it was 1st April, I thought you'd just gone a bit loopy.
  12. Marty_d
    I don't think they bother with doors on the outhouse, out Smifton way.
  13. Marty_d
    Actually it was all up hill after that, 10-15 degree potholed driveway. I don't think a 2wd would have pulled up that trailer at walking pace.
  14. Marty_d
    Bits of my plane are from crashed or written off aircraft. Doesn't worry me in the slightest.
  15. Marty_d
    Ah, forgot this one - crossing our bridge. Pity about the branch in the way.
  16. Marty_d
    It's not a matter of having a phone that can only do 3g, in many areas of Australia you can only GET 3g service. No matter if your phone is 4g or even 5g.
  17. Marty_d
    Big day today! My plane has moved home (temporarily). Neighbours of ours about 300m up the road have a large shed which I helped concrete the floor of. It's 11m x 9m so big enough to set up the plane and mount the wings, install the flaperons, test the fuel system, etc etc. So on to the car trailer today - this is the first time the plane's been fully out of the shed. Moved the fuselage first, then used a queen-size inflatable mattress on the car trailer to bring the wings up one at a time. I locked the elevators by securing the stick and the rudder by means of a couple of angled bits of aluminium bolted together through the rear tie-down point. Mind you I didn't go above 30km/h anyway.
  18. Marty_d
    We're in a mobile dead spot - a lot of the time my phone only connects to 3g. Which is a bugger, I really don't want to buy a new one.
  19. Marty_d
    That wing folding mechanism looks complicated and heavy too. Cars and planes are different machines for different purposes. As Danny mentioned a rotorcraft is a different proposition but will never drive on the road in any case.
  20. Marty_d
    That's what I was going to do, but I wanted to be able to leave the cradles on the wing and lift them onto the wing stands. The front supports are printed to the same profile as the leading edge (6mm bigger to allow for the foam rubber) so hopefully they won't impact the wing. It's certainly far easier to move the wings around on the cradle, even lifting them (ie not on the castored trolley) as you have somewhere to grip. They're only 20kg but without handholds they're bloody difficult to shift around, especially by yourself.
  21. Marty_d
    This is something I should have done a long time ago, even before I built the wings. (Mind you I didn't have a 3d printer back then, but there'd be ways of doing it the old-fashioned wood way!) I've made 2 wooden cradles for the wings, which have printed plastic LE shape to support the LE of the wing and clamps at the back to keep the TE secure. On the bottom of the cradles are steel L's with a bolt through. The cradles and clamps have 6mm self adhesive foam rubber on all surfaces touching the wings. The cradles can be sat vertically, as shown in the pics, on a wheeled dolly which has a vertical post that the bolts go through. They can also be sat at the top of some wing stands that I've also made (haven't got a pic as they're stored under the plane at the moment) with the same bolts. These stands comprise some heavy duty tripod stands from a drum kit (from the tip shop) combined with 2" diameter aluminium tube.
  22. Marty_d
    There's a climate change thread over in Social Australia where denialists can have their say.
  23. Marty_d
    The article says one option is to have the glider land with the plane, still on the tow rope! Sure...
  24. Marty_d
    The Airbus Beluga was based on an existing A300. This looks like a completely new aircraft (there's certainly nothing in the world like it now) so you'd think there'd be a large amount of development work.
  25. Marty_d
    You quickly zip-line to the glider and break away.
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