You really shouldn't be able to see inside the crankcase!
My gliding club switched from a winch to Cessna L-19 Bird Dog towplanes back in 1977 and this is the first time we've had an in-flight engine failure. The engine kept running long enough to return to the field. This is gonna cost a few bucks to fix!
On April 25th in 1972 Hans Werner Grosse, an aviation hero of mine set a new world record for distance flight in a glider. From Lubeck in the north of Germany to Biarritz in the south of France a distance of 1,461KM or over 900 miles. This from a tow to 2,700 feet to start. All the rest was playing the atmosphere and gravity against each other. The record wasn't broken until thirty years later and that was by a three turn point flight in a glider with half again as much performance as the Schleicher ASW-12 Grosse flew. As a straight line distance Grosse's record has not been broken to this day. Hans passed away just a little earlier this year. I wish I could have met him.
The flight:
The pilot:
The aircraft (the ship in the picture is the one owned by Wally Scott of the USA that he flew to the previous record distance of 730 miles):
See the chute hanging off the tail? That was the only device the glider had for approach control. The flaps reflex up two notches for high speed flight and down one for low speed - they provide no significant drag that would help get this 42-44:1 glider into a field. There were no airbrakes as the designer Gerhard Waibel designed this aircraft for world breaking performance and he had trouble with integrating effective airbrakes into fiberglass gliders with long thin wings on the D-36 Circe university glider project when he was on that team. When you go to land an ASW-12 you pull the lever to deploy the chute. Usually it deploys and you make a nice steep approach and land. If you misjudged conditions and start to undershoot all you can do is jettison it, no second chances. If it doesn't deploy (and that happened from time to time) you have to rely on the old forward slip to get it down on the ground. That's one thing in a slab sided, draggy J-3 Cub but quite a bit more challenging in something that converts 1,000 feet of altitude to over seven miles of distance and has a 60 foot wingspan!
Ever since my wife was on a sailboat for the first time a year and a half ago we've been planning on taking the training to get certified to be in command of sailboats in the approximately 25 foot and up category. I'm competent to sail small boats - the ones where of you run a ground you just pull the centerboard up, step over the side and push then back into water deeper than about a foot. Give it a ballast keel, engine, galley, beds etc. and I'm out of my league. The pandemic has put that training off until next spring in all likelihood so I started looking for a little boat we could go sailing on this summer. Found one:
Crawford Melonseed skiff. One sail, two oars and not much else. A modern fiberglass boat based off a 19th century duck hunting skiff. I'm looking forward to getting it out on the water in the next few days. I was surprised to find one for sale out here. I don't think I've ever seen one in Vancouver before. Most of the sailboats in the 12 to 18 foot range are designed for racing and I wanted something more in the nature of a Wind In The Willows/Swallows and Amazons leisurely messing about in boats type. Not easy to find.
Had an upset stomach late Saturday night. Woke up 7:30 Sunday and spent much of the day vomiting profusely. I have recurrent IBS so I thought that's what it was. Got bad enough to check in to the ER 18:00 Sunday. Found out I have A: a big gallstone (and we just finished caring for my mother in law after her gall bladder operation!) and B: a blockage. So the plan is to drain my stomach (tube down the nose - not one of life's great pleasures) and do some medicating and rest waiting for the blockage to break up. Seems that the blockade is in an area of scarring I got from surgery after my bike accident back in 1993. They try to avoid more surgery to correct this as it can cause more scarring and more blockage in the future. So, how's everyone else's Sunday/Monday? Better I hope. (p.s. I'm in Canada and it seems the hospitals around Langley etc are doing pretty well when it comes to patient load)
Just went out to do some grocery shopping and saw this beauty in the lot:
Injected 13B, limited slip, leather interior... Incredibly good condition from the tires to the headliner. The owner happened to get to his RX-7 at the same time I got to my car so we had a talk. A fifteen year old who came out of the store with his Mum gawked over the car too before she made him finish loading their groceries and get in the car too.
@hfv Look at first picture, yeah, looks decent, look at second picture... what's the big problem? That little stain on the seat? Scroll down further on the second picture... AUUUUUGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Go back to first picture primed to look for awfulness... what sort of hell has that front wheel been through?
To put things in perspective Australia, with a population of about 26,000,000, has had 30,000 Covid cases and 910 deaths in total. That's pretty damn good compared to the fustercluck most nations made of responding to the disease.
@aremmes Thighs can be really delicious but I'm a breast lover myself... wait, that came out all wrong.
@his_stigness I know someone who was in a similar situation - including the possible upcoming promotion and new manager coming in a month. She let it ride until the new manager took charge then took it up with him. The dead weight got the promotion she was hoping for. Apparently the new manager figured "Well, I can promote the good worker and then have to deal with the dead weight for the foreseeable future and probably do their work for them too... or I can promote the dead weight so he's not my problem anymore and keep the competent employee... decisions. decisions..."
Damn tempting but I don't have the "aw, what the hell, I'll buy it!" cash for it. If it was a 2CV instead of an Acadiane the temptation would be even stronger.
https://vancouver.craigslist.org/van/cto/d/new-westminster-northeast-1981-citroen/7437265954.html
At first I thought that was a Baby Bowlus hanging from the rafters but it's actually a Nelson Dragonfly, a pretty rare but sadly not too successful attempt at a self launching motorglider (they did a lot better with the next model - the Hummingbird which no one really managed to better until the mid-70s).
@Mr-Ontop I love a good carbon-based fibre body kit! (It actually reminds me of the episode of Futurama where Bender rebuilt himself out of wood)
@CarsOfFortLangley Nice. Reminds me of the original Daisy air rifle from the late 1800s:
Also reminds me that I really have to get off my rear and finally take the PAL/RPAL course this year.
@Miss-Mercedes Glad to hear you're back, even with the vaccinations Covid can still get pretty bad.
@KngT What do you figure the odds are that this has been posted to idiotsincars... and that at least one comment is blaming the cam car for driving too slow and camping in the middle lane?
That looks like a great Sunday!
Get KOFL a toboggan in a few years:
@Mr-Ontop There should be a physical connection between the strings and the electronics, unless it had active pickups (though with active pickups it also shouldn't be possible to get a shock in the first place). Usually when you get a shock like this it is because of a ground issue. On old amps with unpolarized two prong plugs it is possible to plug them in and end up with the chassis of the amp live which results in the shield of the cord and anything connected to it (including the strings and bridge) being live as well. Then you can get a shock when you touch the strings and anything else which is grounded. Amps like this had a ground switch for this. You would try it both ways and the position which was the quietest was the proper one. With an amp with a tree prong grounded plug the chassis should always be grounded. In that case you can still get shocked if the outlet itself is wired incorrectly. Quite a few people who play in bars and clubs maker a point of taking an outlet polarity tester with them because of this.
My second guitar amp (and my first good guitar amp) was a 1968 Fender Super Reverb. I bought it around 1990. No one told me about the ground switch so sometimes I had it in the wrong position and I would get shocked if I had my hand on the strings and went to close the window in my room - the window frames were aluminum and fastened to the concrete foundation wall of the house so they were grounded. Fortunately a few months into my ownership of the amp someone explained to me the ground switch function. If I still had a vintage amp like that these days I would convert it to a three prong, grounded cord for safety.
@CarsOfFortLangley And once again I can't make it. I have a funeral to go to that day.
