Old Koreelah

Thank you for an amazing tour of some of your country's historic landmarks. Amazing quality video and wonderful music. For armchair travellers like me, even better than National Geographic!

Just a little spray of marine 2T oil into the high-speed intake. I'd much rather nikasil bores like my Guzzi...

...When the carby on the Jabiru motor was increased from 32 to 40mm to get more power, I was unhappy because I didn't want more power, I wanted more reliability...

I pestered the Jab factory about shimming the barrels to reduce compression and allow the use of crap fuel.

They talked me out of it, so I fitted a standard 85hp Jab and it transformed the little baby.

I would never go back in power.

Before the west stuffed it up, many Antipodeans of my generation experienced extreme hospitality when travelling overland to Europe via Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey.

Good manners, compassion and courtesy seem to be almost universal traits, but too often over-ridden by the worst aspects of human nature- which religion and nationalism prey upon.

...mankind is the ONLY animal that can choose to act in a kind and caring way toward other sentient beings. It is true a lot of us don't and that is appalling...but we can...

I have no expertise, but before shutdown I have been squirting 2t oil via an injector tube just downstream of the carby. How much to inject? I just run it hard (tethered to something solid) until lots of blue smoke belches out.

Following recent advice from this forum I have switched to marine 2t. Trouble is, it's smokeless, so you have to guess when to stop squirting.

Torquey low-revving engines allow you time for such distractions, OME. Even with damaged controls, my Ducati could take me and lady passenger plus mobs of luggage on long night trips in rain, fog and sleet.

After gear lever broke off at Oran Park: reached down with shifter to change up, then stayed in 5th.

After throttle drum broke: mounted choke lever with throttle cable. Operated by right thumb, it worked fine for months.

I had a Morris Minor 1000 for a number of years, great little commuter, the battery crapped out one day so i just used the hand crank for about 6 months...Reason they don't have them now is that people used to leave them in gear and got run over when they started...

I have used several different smartphone tracking apps over the years, while flying or riding the bike. As Sav says, OzRunways tracking is great, but I'd like to know if it works via satellite or just mobile towers. If it's limited to phone towers that's not a big problem unless you're really going remote; from flying altitude you're rarely out of range of the Telstra system, and even when you "drop off the radar" for a while the breadcrumbs should make finding you that much easier.

I've had a hawk slide the length of my Blanik wings, riding the leading edge lift, rising a little to clear the canopy.

Bloody freeloaders!

I remember the kick start- when bikes were bikes and men were men.

Thanks for posting, GG. I'll be sharing this with my three granddaughters- 5, 3 and 0.5. They're all fascinated by mechanical devices and obviously future aviators!

5 :1 compression ratio? Even our old grey kerosene Fergie was higher than that!

DrZoos you are in error. Birds also have avionics, etc, plus something we are a bloody long way from developing: self-repairing structures. As you say, many are quite short-range, but even some small models roam the planet and can travel enormous distances without refueling.

It's an accepted fact. Your prejudices might not want to believe it but it just is. Sorry to burst your bubbles. Nature is not perfect....nor even particularly nice or good. Mankind is far superior.

People have been making flying machines for a century or so, and even our best still have very narrow performance bands. To be comparable we need a man-carrying machine that can takeoff pretty much vertically, soar for hours and cross oceans then land on a handkerchief. All this and it would carry its own complex equipment to convert a variety of low-energy sources into fuel.

...modern sailplanes are more efficient than soaring birds.

Past efforts to replicate the wings of birds and insects were doomed to fail, but with so many new wonder materials (and electronic control systems) becoming available, the time for copying nature may have arrived.

My current back-of-an-envelope project is to develop large-scale feathers. Until we have the technology to grow them biologically, perhaps we can fabricate carbon fibre feathers. If mounted with mechanisms to rotate and twist them in flight we might approach the efficiency of nature's best- and be able to fold the wings away before to taxiing off the strip.

Why do little aeroplanes need to be so heavy? Do we need a 65kg engine? By starting with a super light power source we can scale down every other component, hopefully reducing final weight by a large margin.

If I start work next week I might have the prototype ready for flight testing before my nineties... Therein is the age old problem: by the time we get the damn thing built we may be too old and slow to test it- and should we expect some young pilot to risk their necks to test fly our contraption?

...My bike doesn't have a fuel gauge, but after lots of tests, I know that I get about 10 kilometres per litre. My reserve tank holds just on three litres, so I know that I've got a safe 20 kilometres with reserve before I start walking...

OME

I discovered the hard way that my Ducati had a range on reserve of 11 km. Fixed that by fitting taller tubes inside the fuel taps.

Me too Nev. I still convert back to compare with performance of bikes and cars yonks ago.

Multiply km/l by 2.824= mpg.

I am intimately familiar with the pint as a unit of measurement!

Just came in to get out of the heat and switched on the idiot box. For anyone who hasn't seen it or wants to see it again, the BoB is on shortly.

Phil Irving was well aware of the "problem" I mentioned, He recommended an angle of 67 degrees...

...90 degree Vee Twins are fairly smooth...

...We found a guy over in the UK who sends a complete service history for 10 pounds sterling and this active history is pretty impressive to say the least !...

G

Much as I admire the Japanese, the resurgence of nationalism and denial of war crimes committed by their forefathers is a worry. There are movies of Japanese committing atrocities, and video interviews with veterans describing in detail the nasty things they did. Many old Japanese soldiers have expressed profound shame at their own behaviour during the war; why can't their government put that into the school curriculum?

There will never be good relations with China and Korea until they honestly face up to their past.

The Japanese army did clash with the Russians in China and were thoroughly thrashed in the process. It made them VERY wary of ever taking on the Russians for the duration of the war.

A hero of WWII (and possible inspiration for the character of James Bond) was a German who spied for the USSR.

His reports allowed Stalin to move critical forces west just in time to stop the Nazis at the gates of Moscow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge