Jump to content

Bruce Tuncks

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    3,477

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    19

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Bruce Tuncks

  1. Bruce Tuncks
    Acronyms: Once I was reading some CASA stuff and I said to myself GAGONY ( get a grip on yourself ) and BAM ( be a man ) and JLUTFG ( just look up the f/ing glossary). Well the second acronym wasn't in the glossary! I hate acronyms. They may have had a place when teletypes did telegrams , now their only purpose is obfustication... they are very effective at this, these days they stop me trying to read it at all.
  2. Bruce Tuncks
    Rf guy, please do only one thing at once on your Jabiru cooling mission. I can't talk though, I did several things at once and now I don't know what worked and what did not. Mind you, the engine ran nice and cool but I should have been more scientific. Ian, is there a thread on the other site where we can discuss the war with china stuff?
  3. Bruce Tuncks
    Yep, dogs need to be on a lead at the airfield. Are there some places which ban dogs even on leads? what possible reason could they have for this? I have never taken the dog in the plane, but it sure loves the car and gets all excited at the prospect of a car trip. I think the dogs ( border collies around here) really understand how good cars are and how they cover ground fast and effortlessly.
  4. Bruce Tuncks
    I was there when a Jabiru lost most of its fiberglass prop covering. It made a thump noise followed soon after by an engine shut-down. Apparently the out-of-balance forces were feeling like the engine would be ripped out. The air had ripped the glass off. The pilot handled the situation ( engine failure at 300 feet, not enough runway straight ahead) very well and I was first on the scene to congratulate him. No damage. Those old jab props had the fiberglass covering routed off at the leading edge and replaced with a butt-jointed rubber shaped bit. This works ok as long as the prop tape is in good order, but in this case the prop tape had been removed by our then maintenance guy.
  5. Bruce Tuncks
    Yesterday I tried, from a cold start, opening the throttle a few seconds after the engine started with choke, and sure enough it stopped. In nearly 20 years of avgas, I had fallen into the habit of opening the throttle early on to get the revs over 1000 when the engine runs much smoother than with the 600 rpm idle I have it set to. Not once did it cause the engine to stop, so this is the only difference between mogas and avgas I have noticed so far. The slow idle is in order to shorten the ground run after landing, and yes it is marginal. But on a warmed up engine, there is no more tendancy for stoppage than before the change to mogas. So thanks again guys for the help.
  6. Bruce Tuncks
    Yenn, I read that corruption is so bad in Pakistan that many pilots hired a professional exam sitter to act for them in tests. So many airline pilots had no real qualifications.... hard to believe huh.
  7. Bruce Tuncks
    While I agree that gliding has a serious demographic problem, I don't see what the GFA management can do about it. In recent years, they seem to have been trying hard to get gliding growing again. What they are up against is the fact that gliding is no longer the cheapest way to fly, gosh it costs more than $100 for an"experience flight" in a glider while it is about half that in a Jabiru. And this does not even consider models and virtual reality flight simulators, both of which didn't exist years ago. I got into powered planes when the Ventus 2 self-launcher I was considering had it's sales tax exceed the sum of the Jabiru kit plus a hangar kit... Yes it was awhile ago but the ventus went over $150,000 and the sales tax was 26% or $39,000. The Jabiru kit was $34800 and the hangar kit was $4000. ( In those days there was sales tax on gliders and none on powered planes)
  8. Bruce Tuncks
    Well my Borgelt vario was the best I ever had. But for once I have to disagree with Mike, cos I reckon that even a bit of gliding many years ago helps the power pilot if the engine stops. Why? because it will make the power pilot less likely to panic if the noise stops. I have seen pics of crashed power planes in good paddocks. They died on board because the plane hit at a very nose-down attitude. The only way this could have happened is if the power pilot forgot about flying ( gliding ) the plane at the wrong moment. Yes, there have been pure power pilots who have done well here and I am sure that there would be a few with glider experience who have done poorly. It is a matter of probability. It seems reasonable to me to think that this type of crash would be less likely if the pilot had been given some gliding experience. On the subject of Neil Armstrong, I read that it was the solo nature of his glider flying which led the NASA management to think that he would be a safer bet than those of his peers who had always been part of a team, in the unlikely event that he had to come home solo.
  9. Bruce Tuncks
    The round holdens of the day sure rolled good too. The start of the movie" Sunday too far away" has the hero rolling his holden.
  10. Bruce Tuncks
    I wanted a VW beetle in those days but I was too young and poor. I loved the sound of the blower, and yes the rear wheels pivoted around the gearbox so one could tuck under and set off a roll. Only a wimp would worry about this...
  11. Bruce Tuncks
    Nope, he was negotiating a sideways slope and just when the instrument said, he rolled.
  12. Bruce Tuncks
    Yep Nev, a brother-in -law had a Pajero with an inclinometer. Sure enough, just when the instrument said, the Pajero rolled. But I always thought this was a sideways thing and not a fore and aft thing.
  13. Bruce Tuncks
    On the Jabiru, I never hear the stall-warning on landing but it sure seems to settle well when the speed has washed off on the hold-off prior to landing. On the subject of glider-pilots, as well as Sully, there was Neil Armstrong.
  14. Bruce Tuncks
    Here's what happened today. I measured the resistances of the coils and got 6.44k-ohms for each high-voltage line ( meter clipped between the HT lead and the earth) and 1.0 ohms for the low voltage line. Both coils were exactly the same. Then I tried seeing the spark-pulse. I wrapped a clip-lead 3 times around a spark-plug lead and measured the induced voltage with a moving coil meter. Nothing! This electrical stuff is trickier than I am. I tried both ac and dc ranges. Maybe my old moving-coil meter is not up to much these days. Next I tried a start using lee-wave's idea of not touching the choke after starting. It worked! Maybe this month-old mogas is trickier for starting than avgas was? Anyway, I went for a circuit between the rain-showers, and the engine was ok. Next visit to the airfield, I will try to duplicate the stopping problem. Maybe I was opening the throttle too soon, something I tend to do because the idle is smooth at 1000 rpm but quite rough at 700 rpm. I was not conscious of stopping the engine by opening the throttle the other day though. I do have the idle set low as I don't like the idea of longer than necessary ground-runs on landing. Thanks for all the comments.
  15. Bruce Tuncks
    Yep, the fuel had been in the tank for 3 weeks. Also, it was bought in Edenhope and who knows how old it was when I bought it. I don't have an induction type timing light but I do have a moving-coil meter and I'm going to try that with a coil around a plug lead. But the motor easily passes the mag test before take-off so it seems to me that the fuel may be the issue. Its raining here right now so I cant do my chores till that stops then I can head out to the airfield.
  16. Bruce Tuncks
    Thanks guys. Lots of things to try out. I'll report back later today.
  17. Bruce Tuncks
    I agree with Nev. Having been a glider pilot for 40 years before flying power, I have to say that gliders are easier to land than the Jabiru. They have big airbrakes without which landing would be very difficult. With those big airbrakes, landing is easier. Like any tailwheel plane. they can take off again if flown on too fast. So the technique is to get the wheels a foot off the surface and try to keep it there as it slows down. You land by trying not to. This is exactly the same as a trike Jabiru. At this time, you are looking well ahead and using small smooth stick movements, gradually feeding in more elevator up as the plane slows. Its fun learning, and remember that no good pilots take landing for granted. They always try for a "greaser " but rarely achieve a perfect one. But as Nev says, you can't do a "go around" with a glider!
  18. Bruce Tuncks
    It's exactly how Einstein figured out relativity. There is NO difference between gravity and inertia... so what had to give? only our commonsense ideas of space and time. Gravity is the warping of space-time. ( no, I don't really understand it either... what about gravitons, I wonder) BUT in OME's defence, the rock on the string does tell you something in straight and level flight at constant speed. Yes it would need damping to stop the swinging, and then it would tell you slip/skid and Angle of Attack. But wait! we already have that instrument for the sideways stuff. I call it the skid ball and in a glider it is too slow so it is duplicated with a yaw string. If the yaw string blows away, the ball will still be there though. A fore and aft skid ball would tell you stuff, as long as there was no inertia to worry about.
  19. Bruce Tuncks
    Here's a puzzle I need to sort out... On the last 2 starts, the engine has fired up almost instantly as usual, but then stopped after about 8 seconds. It fires up again with the starter, then stops again. It does this about 4 times before keeping running. I don't think it is the fuel supply to the carb, but I think this is the most likely thing... the fuel level drops in the float chamber etc. Why don't I think it is the fuel supply? Because the fuel pressure gauge shows nothing unusual ( the gauge take-off point is between the mechanical pump and the carby inlet ) and after the engine stays running, everything seems normal. But what electrical thing could cause this problem? As regards the choke, the stopping seemed not to be effected by choke or no choke. Once in the air, everything was fine. Mind you, I have stayed close to the airfield after this event. The 2.2 engine is now running on mogas, as it has for a couple of months now.
  20. Bruce Tuncks
    Gosh I would like to be west NZ. Ever since the Rainbow Warrior stuff I have said that.
  21. Bruce Tuncks
    To those of you who have farm properties to fly from... You can make sure that those who enter the property have BOTH biosecurity and ohs qualifications to legally be there. I doubt if CASA is up to this right now. They will be in the fullness of time as they will send their favourite sons to Tafe to get these tickets.
  22. Bruce Tuncks
    Nice pics, but really old. The airstrip is now some distance away at Yulara.
  23. Bruce Tuncks
    Gosh onetrack, that almost seems like theft or fraud to me. Surely they must have been offered at auction? But I can well imagine a very fast and poor attempt at auctioning those tyres, allowing the auctioneers to "buy" them. Once I was at an auction where the car was very quickly hammered down to an accomplice of the auctioneer, leaving higher bidders shaking their heads in anger.
  24. Bruce Tuncks

    FS 2020.

    Bruce Tuncks replied to lee-wave's topic in Flight Sim

    I downloaded FS2020 and got caught out by the gigabytes exceeding the lot allowed for me on my plan! It took over 24 hours to load 160 gbytes. I could easily have waited and used an unlimited download place but I was too slow to think of it. First impressions are that rf is right and that it is more use cross-country than near the ground. I found that you can land it just about anywhere and this is obviously not true in the real world. The main test will be when I get a virtual reality headset. Previous flight simulators all failed with me because the realism was not there with the small computer screen.
  25. Bruce Tuncks
    The last Pickles car auction I went to sold very few of the cars because their ( undisclosed) reserve was not met. They loaded the unsold cars on trucks and re-auctioned them interstate. I never went to another pickles auction.
×
×
  • Create New...