onetrack

Old K - I can recall a mate and myself discussing the future design of vehicles around 1980. The mate predicted that cars in the future would have a totally sealed front end, with just a flap for checking oil and water.

He reckoned any failure under the bonnet would result in your car being scrapped - or they'd just slice off the front end, and stitch on a complete new power unit, just like sealed units in a fridge.

I don't think he was too far wrong in many respects. There is a lot to be said for having power units sealed, eliminating the problems of wear-and-corrosion-inducing dust and moisture.

Temperature and humidity variations are the killers that cause corrosion and degradation. You will find that in every situation where items must be preserved, both temperature and humidity are tightly controlled.

Keep the engine at a steady temperature that is high enough to prevent condensation. You can do this with a simple heat source such as an incandescent light bulb inserted into areas where you don't want condensation to collect.

A good rule of thumb is to keep the temperature of your stored engine at least 5°C warmer than the surrounding air.

I think it may be a stretch calling Ingelara an "airport". It appears to be only a grass strip and part of Ingelara Cattle Farm. The farm address is O'Briens Road, Rewan, QLD 4702.

The farm is run by Stuart and Cheree Ogg, look up "S.K. Ogg" under Residential in the White pages. Thruster has provided the correct number.

The problem with so much of our high-tech equipment today is the inability to repair any component. Mechanics today no longer have any basic diagnostic ability, they're taught to simply hook up the big diagnostic computer and replace the major component that is causing the problem.

In the old days, that component would be repairable - in todays world, very little is repairable, it's all sealed, with the classic "no user-serviceable components inside", decal attached.

How many Ladas are still running around, and how many older Toyotas are still going? That about says it all. Even the Americans have a major size group who love FJ45's and rebuild them wholesale.

They bring huge money in the U.S. in restored condition. The Americans even copy our Australian-style trays in their restorations.

https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/cars-for-sale/toyota/fj45

I haven't seen a Lada Niva for years, although I know they have their followers - particularly in areas where they love their cheap and rough runabouts. They certainly were very capable off-road.

The Russian farm tractors arrived in numbers here in the late 1970's, but by the early 1990's nearly everyone who owned one was sick of the poor parts backup, the poor build quality - and of course, the poor resale value that went with it.

I think the final nail in the coffin was many people finding out that much of Russian industry in that era, employed slave or forced labour. The Vietnamese sent a lot of their people for "re-education" to Russia, after they won the American War.

But they probably had Vodka to start the ignition!!

The SkyMaxx is typical of so many "new aircraft designs" that simply fall by the wayside, due to unrealistic expectations of the designer, lack of working capital, and a lack of marketing and buyers lining up to buy it.

The plans are probably gathering dust somewhere, while the designer works at his everyday salaried job to enable him to live.

I haven't heard, "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going", said very much in recent times - particularly after the last two 737MAX disasters.

I can remember reading about the Nazis in the bitter Russian Winter of 1941-42, fighting in temperatures that were recorded down to -50°C around Moscow. They had to light fires under their truck engines so they could get them started!

In the Nordic countries, it's common to add 3% methanol to diesel for Winter.

One time when money was tight (early 1980's), and the price of fuel had rocketed to 4 times what it had been, 18 mths prior - the brother decided he'd use up some surplus lighting kero in his diesel HJ60 Landcruiser.

The kero was surplus because we'd had a kero fridge on our gold mine, and the kero fridge had caught fire, and burnt the building down that it was located in!

So he mixed in about 3% lube oil with the kero, added a fair portion of it to some diesel, and the Landcruiser ran on the mix quite happily!

The lube oils for diesels have always contained a much higher level of detergent, than the lube oil for petrol engines. If you use diesel lube oil in a petrol engine it will glaze the bores.

The more recent lube oils for diesels have much higher levels of detergents, and newer chemical types of detergents, than the diesel lube oils of the 60's, 70's and 80's.

This is because, with low emission diesel designs, the pollutants from combustion are being forced down past the rings, rather than blown out the exhaust.

So a higher level of detergency in the lube oil is needed to cope with the extra pollutants from combustion coming down into the sump past the rings.

The story behind the detergent in diesel lube oil is quite interesting. Caterpillar pioneered the diesel tractor and industrial engine in America in 1931 (although MAN and Atlas had commercially successful diesel engines, prior to Cats diesel).

The early Cat diesels were going O.K., until about 1934-35 - then suddenly, they started choking up with huge amounts of sludge in the engines. The Cat engineers couldn't figure out what was going on.

Then they found Standard Oil had been trying a new refining process for their lube oil that removed a naturally-occurring detergent in the original crude oil. That natural detergent had been keeping the Cat diesels clean, up until that point.

Cat went to Standard Oil and told them what they'd discovered - so Standard Oil started adding the detergent to their diesel lube oil - and voila, all the Cat engine sludging problems disappeared!

$150?? What an absolute rort. Nearly as bad as HSBC. I had a credit card with them, the stepdaughter transferred money to me to pay for a major item I bought at auction for her ($2700 worth) - but the auction house dropped the item in handling it, and destroyed it.

I got my money back from the auction house (the CC payment to the auction house was reversed) - then when I drew the cash out to return it to the SD, HSBC charged me a $25, "cash advance fee"!! - just to get my own money back!

Needless to say, I cancelled the CC, and do not deal with HSBC, and never will again.

I don't know what you can say, as regards that crash - except "cowboy" springs to mind. The bloke must have thought he was driving a Pitts Special. Page 10 and Page 16 says it all.

It's the wax content in diesel that causes problems with low temperatures. The oil companies initially had a lot of trouble with diesel made from Bass Strait oil containing too much wax, and it led to a slew of fuel blockage complaints in Alpine conditions. In fact, it led to a slew of farm equipment damage. I read about one bloke who had the oil in his truck sump turn to jelly, with the high wax content in the oil, coming from fuel dilution.

He started the truck engine on a very cold morning and left it idling to warm up - but the oil wouldn't pump, because it was jelled. The truck engine ended up with buggered bearings, before he realised the problem.

"Summer" and "Winter" blends of diesel production and delivery is carried out with no fanfare by the oil companies - in line with the seasons and expected demand.

In fact, there are up to 4 seasonal blends in some regions. The oil companies cut the wax with kerosene or heating oil to thin it.

The problems start when you take some high wax content "Summer" diesel, from an area where it's being supplied in line with seasonal planning - and travel to an area (or height) where the cold is equivalent to Alpine conditions.

They may be able to get them recertified and into the air again - but their biggest battle will be convincing pax that they are now as safe as the original B737. That could take some doing. Boeings credibility is in tatters, like a battlefield flag.

Fuji Heavy Industries (now the Subaru Corporation) was originally formed from some of the remnants of the Nakajima Company after WW2.

The company has been an aerospace manufacturer for many years and designed the Subaru Boxer engine along aircraft engine design lines - but the Boxer engine has no aircraft pedigree.

What is worse, is that because Subaru is a relatively low-production manufacturer - and also because Nissan formerly owned a sizeable portion of Subaru - many components of the Subaru vehicles and engines are made by Nissan.

Now, Toyota is a major shareholder in Subaru and they also supply components to Subaru under contract. In addition, Subaru has had a recent scandal where unqualified employees were allowed to oversee QC.

All of this doesn't go well as regards producing consistently high quality products.

The Subaru diesels had major problems with crankshaft breakage (now cured, apparently), and the petrol EJ25 Boxer engines suffered regular failures due to leaking head gaskets - and the pistons and rings can also give trouble.

Because Subaru chose to use cast hypereutectic aluminum-silicon pistons containing a high level of silicon (12%), this gives their pistons a low coefficient of expansion, and high strength. Their aim was close-tolerance fit pistons.

But those features also make the pistons quite brittle - and they won't tolerate any detonation or pinging, or they will break ring lands. In addition, the oil rings are prone to becoming blocked with carbon, resulting in increased oil consumption.

The bottom line is, there's a small hard-core group of Subaru and Boxer engine lovers out there - but overall, the Subaru Boxer engine has no higher reliability than any other automotive engine, and in fact can suffer from numerous problems.

I personally believe Honda has the best of the Japanese car engines, and Viking appear to believe that, too. But I believe Viking make a big error in sourcing engines from wrecked cars, which doesn't give one a comfortable feeling.

Aeromomentum appear to believe the Suzuki engines are superior - but more importantly, Aeromomentum use all new components, and build their engines utilising the components that are best suited to aircraft use.

Either way, both are still up against the perpetual weight penalty problem associated with purely automotive engines being altered for aviation use.

.......think about using palm oil to pull the babes, as it seemed the glamour of his speedway outfit didn't pull the chicky-babes like it used. Or maybe it was just his age.

Was that a grey hair or three, he could see in the mirror?

But babes were supposed to be drawn to men with the maturity of a few grey hairs? He pondered what to do about erasing them. There must be some products on the market that would.....

....but of course, no-one knew what he was talking about, because snow is rarely seen in Australia, and "yellow snow" is a standard American joke.

Meantimes, CASA was onto the sky signwriter for unauthorised acrobatic flying without the proper endorsements, and the suitably certified aircraft.

As soon as the Tyro landed and the prop stopped spinning, a CASA operative was standing right by the cockpit, clipboard in hand.

But Turbo had already ditched the hand-operated smoke generator overboard, just prior to landing, to ensure there was "insufficient evidence to prosecute".

However, what he didn't know, was the smoke generator had landed right on the roof of the CASA operatives car - thus, not only increasing the CASA operatives fury - but generating an additional damage bill as well.

Turbo was facing the most difficult moment of his flying career - and when the nearly-apoplectic CASA operative started to furiously unload on him, Turbo knew that.......

The Porsche flat sixes were troublesome enough in their cars, let alone putting them in an aircraft. They had many design failings.

Top that with a manufacturer who ended up not supporting the aero engine design, because they went on to "newer and better design" engines, and you're left with an expensive orphan.

A very good assessment of where Porsche failed with aero engine design, is in the link below.

http://www.seqair.com/Other/PFM/PorschePFM.html

There's no doubt automotive engine design has improved greatly in the last 25 years. But auto manufacturers are prepared to support their engines for about 15 years, and that's not a long time.

Then there's the perpetual weight problem. Despite car manufacturers concentrating on weight decreases in recent years, the engine has received the minimal amount of weight reduction.

....can be used as aviation engine oil (avref) in cases of emergency. But the origins of the smoke were more interesting. What generated the smoke, and what was that curious smell? "I've got it!", cried Turbo. "It's a mixture of.....

It's also important to remember, that if you under-insure for the full value of the aircraft, the insurance company will also reduce the amount paid for repair works, to the same percentage as your total-loss insurance figure.

This means if you incur repairable damage to the tune of, say $20,000 - and you're deemed to have only insured for total-loss figure of 80% of the actual value - then the insurance company is entitled to only pay for 80% of the damage claim.

One of the problems with what3words is they utilise satellite maps for "entry points" - but satellite imaging is often woefully out of date. In many country areas of Australia, satellite imaging records can be several years old.

Rapid development in numerous areas means major changes that satellite imaging does not record. You get to the area, and find everything is different on the ground, as compared to what the satellite imaging is telling you.

Don't be too complacent, we have our share of people in control of equipment here, who have demonstrated their competence to incompetent instructors - and got their licence regardless.

Rendrag, put a clamp meter on your starter cable to see what amperage it's drawing when you hit the starter. A cold morning will see the amperage draw go up by an appreciable amount.

It's fairly important to find the manufacturers specifications on the starter. The starter manufacturer should provide a graph of the current, power, cranking speed, and voltage in the starter circuit.

....the fact we wrote them out in Hindu, instead of Urdu. Of course, you can see how easy it is to confuse the two - just a couple of letters wrong, and BANG, your cover is blown".

"It wasn't just the fact you wrote the licences out in Hindu", sneered Cappy. "It was the fact you wrote them out from right to left in Hindu, when any fool knows Hindu is written left to right!"

"Well", said Turbo, "The printers we employed should've picked this up! I guess that's the problem with using.......

.......t.....t.....terrific, to be able to take on the..........