Lightning goes where it wishes to go. In the case of Paul's ILS/marker box, the thing was switched off, but his bolt traveled along night lighting circuitry, arriving at the box via that wire. The w
No specialization by me for sure, but there's research as to how a wing or fuselage must present a preferential path to wiring and control mechanisms...down to a measure of milliohms in aluminum ski
Concerning reliability of automotive electronics systems that get too complex, I had a feeling the link below might be now happening out there. 60% of a huge service manual on my new Toyota Solara is
The DAR/ FAA signoff is essentially permission to go flight test for 40 hours to see what the various airspeed limits are, among everything else. It should make no difference that it's a kit, and th
There's many variables in that test, but not in the differential compression test which is universal in the airplane service biz. That test gives you something to track trends, and even spot potenti
Europa. downloaded half of The link below is to an XS trigear which runs on 2002/2004. You may want to see if FSEditor will patch some of its oddities. http://www.simviation.com/fs2002props33.htm Re
blue foam If you mean the stuff from Wicks Aircraft, yes and it's fun stuff. If exact 50/50 mix, it's only somewhat softer than blue foam. But for what you describe, it should work. For some jobs, i
Factory wing it makes If the encoder is plumbed to the same static source as the altimeter, as it should be, then both encoder and altimeter will "read" the same...but not necessarily accurate altitu
Have 28 years now learning about canopy covers, on a plane residing downwind of an [acidic] coal-fired power plant. My last two covers (the 1st one lasted 10 years) were from planecover.com, but sor
its there tension to is. I only had to cut off the bolt to achieve a fit in a smallish, aftermarket fairing I scrounged and modified with glass and matching polyester resin to make it pretty around
regulator. in mind higher as the A poor connection -- pos or ground -- between the regulator and battery will cause lower voltatge at the battery, not a higher voltage. It acts as a current-limiting
blocks just contain a voltage limiter, a big zener so to say. If it is a current limiter it will run cold on low loads and hot on high loads however, and that will change my ideas on wiring the syst
All antenna designs are compromises of one thing vs. another. A straight dipole isn't 50 ohms; Archer's antenna appears to of the type that solves the balun problem; 1.1:1 VSWR at mid-band is nice, b
For production aircraft, FAA requires two vents if you have one tank. Another rule says a sole, exposed vent on the bottom of the aircraft can be clogged by mud or snow. It is certainly possible a bu
Not much to photograph, but for similar aesthetic reasons my primary vent is a hole in the vertical fin leading edge, which is a short pitot tube inside, with water trap using 1/4" nylon hardware. I
into I have a knee-jerk problem with design fixes seen on no production A/C as far as I know. Could not the problem be fixed with a modification to the aluminum vent fitting? Like adding a metal tube
wondering if there are recommended things to do beyond what the manual describes prior to installation. On the trigear, later access to the tunnel to route and secure things, like wires, battery cab
That would require an all-knowing assumption as to the most common destruction mode of the structure in the event of a crash. Then test it, both metal and rubber lines, in crashes. :-) Our gov't act
Harbor Freight and such sell a manual vacuum pump, inlcuding a clever bottle used to intercept and observe fluid sucked out of the bleeder screw. Just need to keep the master cylinder level up. My IA
(;-) too stiff . Come to think, I have to agree on ductile 3003. Just doesn't look as pretty. There was an interesting NASA display at an Oshkosh once. Actual crashed fiberglass structures; slow-mot