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Moneybox

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Everything posted by Moneybox

  1. I think you're missing the point Nev. Having the air pass through a large aluminium chamber in a hot engine bay will be introducing heated air. If Rotax wanted to prevent this they could have easily reduced the surface area of the box or it could be insulated from the accumulated heat in the top rear of the engine bay. Perhaps they intend to raise the temperature of the incoming air to prevent carburettor icing particularly at lower engine revs where the air spends more time in that chamber.
  2. Perhaps Rotax did their homework on this one and thus prevented a known problem with carburettor icing by the induction of preheated air. 😉
  3. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. I'm hoping they have what they claim to have because it'll not only improve safety but should significantly reduce battery cost once there's local manufacture and competition. This thread is about the Knob engine. Is the Donut engine a genuine product or just media hype as well?
  4. My brother and Sister-in-law own the Cape Palmerston Holiday Village. I guess they'll be getting a good damping down at the moment. The difference between there and here is like chalk and cheese. You'll get a few inches in a good downpour. Here it can bucket down for an hour or so and we might see 10mm in the rain gauge.
  5. I can't think of a better one. If you are going to draw air through an aluminium box mounted high in the rear of the hot engine bay then you are going to be feeding preheated air into the carburettors. I don't don't have the data to back that up but Skippy has stated previously his engine bay temperatures. The upper rear unventilated area is most likely as hot an area as you can find. Heat transfer is inevitable.
  6. Perhaps that big aluminium airbox absorbs enough engine bay heat to do the job?
  7. I can't see a reason for that comment. Of course it's the sceptics' job to knock every new innovation but if they are ready to market a motorcycle powered by a Donut motor and a Donut battery then there could be more to it than media hype. I can understand their need to keep the technology secret as long as possible because anybody and everybody wants a piece of the action if it's as successful as quoted. I would like to see the end to Lithium batteries due to their destructive properties that we're seeing demonstrated every day. It's only a matter of time before a passenger packed airliner crashes to earth after one faulty Lithium battery carried in hand luggage or cargo sets off a chain of events that cannot be controlled. Of course it may have already happened, we don't always get the whole story when a plane comes down.
  8. A very interesting prototype but perhaps a little late to the market. Time will tell but with innovation like the Donut engine (as posted by Kyle Communications) combined with the Donut solid state battery it seems electric power is likely to soon become efficient enough to be the norm in many vehicles including aircraft.
  9. In my RAAus training in the Harmony with a Rotax 912 we only ever tested carby heat operation at run-up. Carby heat was never used in flight.
  10. I've found it better to buy the multi layered heat shrink from someone like MM Electrical, an electrical wholesaler. It seems to have a resin or something in there so it not only shrinks but seals and bonds as well. Not easy to remove but I don't usually want to pull my soldered joins apart. It stays tubular as well unlike some of the cheap stuff that flattens and kinks easily.
  11. I've lagged my exhaust manifolds and muffler mainly to protect the many hoses. Since I had to rebuild No.2 pipe it has a slight dogleg too so that the filter can be removed. Neither of these is an allowable modification but necessary in my opinion.
  12. 34 years ago we did a trip to Ayres Rock and took the aboriginal tour around the base. The old gin showed us how they extracted the resin from the base of the spinifex grass by placing it into a coolamon and belting it with a stick. The resin mixed with fragments of grass, then she heated the coolamon over an open fire melting the contents into a bitumen like goo. She then demonstrated its use for holding stone spear tips and axe heads in place forming the hot solution with her bare hands. Each of the children received a stick with a ball of resin on the end, like a lolly pop. She (or the translator) said to reuse it just reheat it and that's all they had to do to change a spear tip or axe head. My son still has his memento that he received at 8yrs of age.
  13. It wouldn't matter if the spinifex was green or dry, I've seen green patches of spinifex sending flames 6m into the air. We often camp in spinifex country and take a lot of care to contain the fire because once ignited there's no stopping it. It would make a very bumpy landing area too.
  14. Maybe we need to concentrate on the reason for the fire. Why do planes burn so often when crashed? Road vehicles regularly crash with a very small percentage of those catching fire. Surely some preventative measures could be taken to reduce the risk of fire. He walked away from the crash so the plane may have only had minor damage before going up in a cloud of smoke.
  15. He could have just been awfully unlucky. I had one attempt at landing at Jandakot where we dropped dramatically just after crossing the fence. We pulled up in ground effect over the grass. My instructor slammed the panic button and shouted go-around but it was too late to panic because we were setup for a perfect landing, just about 100m too early. We executed a go-around but I'd have just applied enough throttle to reach the runway. It all happened to quickly for either of us to react in time to prevent to rapid decent.
  16. I've been told any landing you walk away from is a good one. Did he pass?
  17. Very lucky you had your seat belt well fastened.
  18. It looks just like the wetlands we flew over in Botswana but there we could see herds of large grazing animals, elephants, hippos, buffalo, zebras, impalas, giraffes and many more. Apart from Kangaroos we seemed to be a bit short of large plant eaters. Did the aboriginals wipe the out?
  19. It was built by my father-in-law. He flew competitions across Australia and in the US. Dick Gibbs: Started control line modelling with a Mills 1.3 installed in a "Junior Cham-peen" then progressed to teamracing and scale. Somehow he became addicted to scale modeling and still has an Albatross DVA control liner that has placed twice at National championships. His favourite was the APS free flight Tiger Moth that won the State Free Flight Scale Champs five years in a row. Dick has flown Radio models since the 60s and is currently dabbling with Vintage C/L stunt.
  20. Mrs M has an Albatros D1-D111 1917 German fighter tucked away somewhere. She won't let me fly it without a tail-dragger endorsement... 😒
  21. I take it everybody walked away safely, tissue not needed?
  22. If you're unlucky enough for one of your many lithium battery devices to burst into flames you're unlikely to survive to fight the fire anyway. LithiumRust.mp4 This is rust on all untreated steel under the Hyundai iLoad dash. The corrosion is only evident since the lithium fire a few weeks back. There was no fire in this area so it has to be chemicals released in the battery explosion.
  23. You can't exactly stand outside and give it a squirt. Whatever it releases you're going to be breathing. Perhaps CO2 is the safest.
  24. Nearly fixed... Still a bit of underbody to fit... I'll regas to air conditioning first thing in the morning. The dirty panels are off the doner vehicle.
  25. Perhaps too late, never got over the attraction and feel....
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