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Bruce Tuncks

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Everything posted by Bruce Tuncks

  1. Bruce Tuncks
    No here too. The plane was a kit Jabiru and there was no welding to do. I already knew the frp techniques, although there is not much there to know. The main thing is to follow instructions, especially surface prep for wet on dry layups. They need sanding till there are no bright spots when under a torch, after blowing clean. You may need an extra layer of cloth if this means you have taken too much off. This is more a matter of attitude than it is to expertise. The worst example I ever saw was done by a highly experienced professional who worked for Harry Schnieder. After some months had passed, the reinforcing glass cloth FELL OFF a bulkhead. With respect to time... the correct way to cost this is to know what you would have been doing instead. For example, if you would have been working for $40 an hour, then the thousand hours you put into the plane is worth 40,000 dollars. However, if working on the plane kept you out of the pub, where you spent 40 dollars per hour, then your time has a negative value and the more time you spend, the better off you are. The thousand hours has a value of -40,000 dollars...
  2. Bruce Tuncks
    I always thought it was a wonderful bit of flying.
  3. Bruce Tuncks
    A mate of mine had an engine failure on his first solo from Port Pirie. He landed back on the airfield and arrived back on foot to the hangar just as the cfi was getting up a worry.
  4. Bruce Tuncks
    I just read that hoch was a real criminal and he " poured contaminants into rivals plane's fuel tanks" to " cause engine failures". If this is true, then he was indeed lucky to not get charged with attempted murder. I withdraw my support.
  5. Bruce Tuncks
    I was once at a talkfest where Rod Stiff said that the trouble with the Jabiru kit was that any fool could build one, so he had to deal with fools too often. This restoration will be a lot harder methinks, but the difference between the Jabiru kit cost and even half a million seems too much. I say don't be too much put off by the cost as you start with a smaller bit, like the tailplane. Then you will know more. And remember what Confucious said... the main thing is to have fun!
  6. Bruce Tuncks
    I agree Ian. Dependents of anti-vaxers pose a problem too. And just last week, we had a hellish problem with centerlink getting an identity so they would talk to us. The main problem turned out to be that the wife changed her name 55 years ago when we got married. That, and the way the software demanded capital letters some of the time but not all.
  7. Bruce Tuncks
    Once, in the air, I heard a vh pilot told off by a glider-pilot for " Occupying the airwaves with useless rubbish" and the glider pilot sure had a point. These days, I use the 126.7 unicom frequency and I often wonder just where the reporting aircraft is. There is no attempt made to say just what place they are "on downwind" for. I guess I should just ask them.
  8. Bruce Tuncks
    There is, or should be, a crime of " demanding money with menaces ". That is how much govt money is got from the taxpayer. In the case of this pilot, was he really ignorant of flying things or was he just not carrying the ( expensive ) bits of paper around?
  9. Bruce Tuncks
    What about taking responsibility for your own actions? I like this idea better than the alternative one of giving up your liberty. Take vaxing as an example... what is wrong with refusing a vax and then catching the disease and dying? In flying, I have never hurt anybody and don't plan to. What frightens me is being driven out by cost pressures caused by some lot who treat me like an idiot who needs a lot of ( paid for ) supervision.
  10. Bruce Tuncks
    I don't like any of this stuff. It reeks of excessive use of power to me, like you would expect from a fascist state. Nobody was hurt, yet a bloke is going to jail for bureaucratic reasons.
  11. Bruce Tuncks
    Turbs, could you tell us more about " classifying a flat tyre as an engine failure ?" That sounds like a sacking offence to me.
  12. Bruce Tuncks
    I guess I'm trying to say that my mate reckoned Chicago drivers to be better than Australian ones.
  13. Bruce Tuncks
    I had a mate who worked it in Chicago. He got slapped in the face for asking a female colleague if she had a rubber he could borrow. Anyway, he was better off than one guy he knew who got a transfer to Australia for 2 years. Shortly after arriving, he was in an accident because nobody made way for him on joining a freeway. Then when he went back to the US, he had another accident when he stopped on the on-ramp
  14. Bruce Tuncks
    The problem will be seen when ev's are more common. There is not enough energy in the electricity system to work all the chargers. To show this, stand by a big road and think of the combined energy of all the engines. It way exceeds what the power station is putting in. I reckon we will be using solar electricity to charge the ev batteries. It will take about 17 and it will need (another) battery if you want to charge your ev overnight. There is a possibility that the charging could occur at work if they invest in enough solar panels.
  15. Bruce Tuncks
    Sorry Glen, we were posting at the same time. I like your idea, and if the price is only a few hundred dollars, then it is just what we need.
  16. Bruce Tuncks
    We need to have an automatic system ( eg the flarm ) which consists of a transmitter/receiver and a computer and ( I think ) a gps. All it does is warn the pilot and that is more than enough I reckon. They sure keep you looking out the window. En-route collisions are more likely since GPS systems came into use. They provide a concentrating factor, but with a bit of software, this can be overcome.
  17. Bruce Tuncks
    I think it was going to happen anyway, but climate change spurred it on. Model planes are nearly all electric these days, and it was not driven by government action at all. It was driven by the better performance of electric models, and the ability to turn them on and off at will. Electric cars should be a lot cheaper than the equivalent IC car, which after all already has an electric starter motor. I have been changing a farm buggy over to electric and it is way simpler stuff. The exhaust system alone on an IC car is quite complex, and that is just one of many systems. The old Ghan train has been a diesel-electric for more than 50 years, and this was driven by costings, not by what was good for the environment. My next car will be electric, and I hope it will be a lot cheaper than now.
  18. Bruce Tuncks
    Ethanol is incompatible with some rubbers/chemicals used in Jabirus for example. It also absorbs water very easily. One test for if there is ethanol in whatever you are about to put into your plane is to add about 10% water and shake. If the water appears to disappear, then it has been absorbed by the ethanol present. Don't use ethanol-mixture petrols without knowing lots of stuff.
  19. Bruce Tuncks
    In my experience, the sky is really big and it takes a concentrating factor ( eg an airfield or an airspace boundary or a cloud-street ) to make the risk of a midair even worth bothering about. I once calculated that if 30 planes were flying at random without looking out the window over Australia's ag lands, there would be a mid-air or a near-miss on average once in 20,000 years. Have you ever tried to meet up with a mate in another plane ? It is harder than you might think, even when you can converse with radio. However, as soon as you introduce a concentrating factor, my math was not up to the job and so thanks Glen.
  20. Bruce Tuncks
    It was the wright bros who found out that you needed to learn how to fly... that was not obvious.
  21. Bruce Tuncks
    But who would want to rely on the crumple thing? And would you not feel bad about wrecking the plane? BUT, those early guys knew nothing about handling etc. I can imagine they would be awful to fly.
  22. Bruce Tuncks
    It was an idea whose time had come, but I liked how the wright bros were better engineers than prof langley. They did experiments and learned from them.... a good example is the propeller. It is easy in principle to imagine a gadget to measure power in and thrust out, but it was the wrights who actually did it... It was interesting though how the patents business actually held america back. It was not only the wright bros who patented everything they could.
  23. Bruce Tuncks
  24. Bruce Tuncks
    Best car I ever had was a Leyland P76 with the 2.6l straight 6 engine. I would still have it but it became so unfashionable that the wife needed a new Toyota. I think it had 600,000 km and it hardly missed a beat. The worst thing was when it blew a ballast resistor and I had to make a 3 second decision whether to try and fix it or catch the bus home. It would start but stop as soon as I stopped cranking. Well I realized the problem as soon as the bus moved off with me in it , and next morning I fixed it in a few minutes. It was the last car I understood what every pipe and wire did.... it had no computer and a single SU carb, which needed a plastic air-cleaner to be sealed with silastic. It got sold for $900, and Romano, a local guy at Elizabeth who restores old cars, nearly wept to hear that. It cost $2400 in '74.
  25. Bruce Tuncks
    best wishes skippy and congratulations. The only test pilot I have ever seen though crashed the sonex. He was a recently-retired Quantas check captain who himself flew a sonex in real life. He lost power at 300 ft and attempted a 270 degree turn, landing so heavily that the uc crumpled and the sonex caught fire. Here is what they should have done first.... they should have tied the plane to a tree and worked the engine harder. Yes, the day previous, they had done high-speed taxi runs but these clearly were not enough. I'm sure this will not happen to you though, so best wishes again... ,,
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