CC'ing Your Heads... seems to generate more messages than any of the other head-related chores. Which is only fair since cc'ing your heads is one of the most important tasks in building a reliable engine. Some argue that cc'ing isn't necessary with stock heads since the spec for stock chambers is...

To All: I have been storing my engine building information in files intended for use with home-built airplanes. But engines are pretty much the same, for airplanes or cars. You're welcome to join but the Chuggers- alt. file isn't a chat group like we have here. You have to ask permission to...

Pants, not wing spars. Has anyone ever dealt with 'Duluth Trading Post?' As some of you know the cancer has caused me to lose about 80 pounds and nearly 2" in height due to the compression fracture of my 5th lumbar vertebrae. Bottom Line: I ain't got NOTHING that fits.

The big problem here is that air cooled engines are different from water cooled engines, and while we can find lots of good information of breaking-in a newly assembled engine, it turns out that 99% of it has to do with WATER COOLED engines. Which turns out to be Bum Dope when you're talking about...

So... how strong is your wing? The only sure way to know is to TEST it. How do we do that? We roll the airframe over on it's nose, support the main spar with a structure of some sort... Douglas Fir 2x4's works okay... then we stack a known weight onto the wing. Still confused? No problem; just...

To All: Oil for the right-hand half of the crankcase arrives there via the channel behind the #2 cam bearing. When building a high-reliability engine a standard procedure is to increase the cross-sectional area of that narrow channel. While this improves things, the amount of oil that can reach...

To All: Recent posts about the Pobjoy radial engine have generated a number of private messages which indicate some subscribers to this Newsgroup lack a basic understanding in how the Internal Combustion engine actually works. For example ALL engines have some degree of overlap in their cam...

Found at the doctor's office. An enormous roll of the stuff, used to cover the examination table. About two feet wide and hell for long. Asked nice, the girl gave me about six feet of the stuff. -R.S.Hoover

To All: About a week ago I posted an appeal for help with my computer sys, damaged during a recent stay in hospital. I've been using a lap-top as the controller. The keyboard was physically damaged (key broken off) and start-up wasn't starting up. Since all of the addresses were in the lap-top,...

Most Experts Aren’t. That's something the late Smokey Yunick said back when I was a seaman deuce. Every month my mail delivers one or two messages saying it's still true. The messages usually come from some superbly experienced fellow who has literally spent his life working on cars or trucks. He...

Mess around with airplanes long enough, you'll get calls from strangers asking for stuff. Hunk of urethane foam. Piece of tubing of a particular diameter & wall-thickness. Quarter sheet of .012 2024-T3. Various tools... I no longer lend tools since they have a habit of not coming back but if...

Yes, we're still here. We are packed and ready to evacuate but the number of safe havens is shrinking as the size of the fires continues to grow. Rather than address a host of questions individually I'll try to give you a snapshot of the Big Picture. The key is the wind velocity. Measured at...

Guy comes by the shop hoping to bum me outta some ammo for his machine gun and finds me stitching a spar together with a gnu-matic brad- driver & foamy glue. He's okay watching me smear on the glue. And he's still happy when I put the plywood into place, aligned by a couple of 3/4" #20 nails...

New-Surplus from American Science & Surplus, item #37146 I bought one of these for about $50 at a truck-stop near Needles some years ago. Even with air-conditioning the single-digit humidity you often encounter when crossing the desert can play hell with your throat and eyes. The old-fashioned...

October is when for a time at least the migger is replaced by the jeweler's torch and the powered hacksaw gives way to a Gigli. Circular cut-outs from flanging dies are rooted out of the junk-box, chucked into the lathe and magically transformed into wheels of every kind. Itty-bitty ball bearings...

To All: A few years ago I posted an article offering some hints about how to build an inexpensive airplane that was safe and reliable (Flying on the Cheap, October 2001; Google will find it for you). The key point in the article was the use of commonly available mild steel tubing for...

To All: About a month ago I posted a message having to do with aircraft crash survival in which I touched on the ability to make a fire, and the features found in a good survival knife. The post produced the usual comments some of which were rather surprising and may be of interest to some of...

To All: Birthdays come faster as you get older. With one rapidly approaching I've been advised that a certain gaggle of grand-children have pooled their funds to buy grandpa something 'really good,' which just happens to be a plastic gizmo consisting of a whistle, compass, thermometer...

...Everything came out BACKWARDS! ...half a dozen of you said, some angrily, others with vigor. They were the adventurous folk who read my post about using a laser printer to make circuit board masks and actually tried it. The point they missed was the bit in the article where I pointed out...

To All: A 'door skin' is a 3' x 7' sheet of 1/8" Luan plywood. It differs from a regular four-by-eight sheet of eighth-inch luan ply because door skins are USUALLY fabricated using waterproof glue. The simple test for waterproof glue is to boil a sample of the plywood. The regular stuff comes...