The Mother of Invention

Some of the busiest flying fields here in San Diego county aren't
airports. Although you can see them from the air or on Google's
satellite shots, most of them don't even exist, according to the
aviation bureaucracy. A couple of them are paved but the others are
dirt, sod, gravel, or a dry lake bed. One is just a section of seldom
traveled road. The ones that are paved usually appear on your air-nav
charts but most of them aren't on any map, their location known only
to airmen or to near-by home owners, if there are any. Which can lead
to some funny situations.

I'd promised to help a friend put some new tires on his
notso-ultralight, hangared under an oak tree about two hours from the
shop. As I loaded the tools into my bus I realized that while I'd
flown into the place a time or two, I didn't know how to get there by
road. Even though I knew the location of the airfield it wasn't
shown on any of the maps I checked. I finally had to call the fellow.

The next day, following the directions I'd penciled onto my Thomas
Bros., I got there a bit ahead of him, parked near his bird, poured
myself a cuppa thermos coffee. Folks were flying but the strip was
well away from the tie-downs. Next door, a couple of guys were working
on blue & white pusher. Pretty. Nowadays there's so many different
ultralights I can't tell one from another. My friend arrives and we
set up a work-station. I don't like doing maintenance on dirt so we
put down a tarp then some cardboard.

He's using six-inch Azusa wheels with juice brakes from that fellow
in Oregon. We get the brake's caliper out of the way, removed the
wheel and were taking it apart when the neighbors wander over to ask if
we might have some spare wire. They're trying to ring-out a wiring
problem using a digital VOM as a continuity tester but the leads are
too short to reach from the engine to the panel.

There's some jumpers somewhere in my kit but I don't want to go dig
them out. Hand them my flashlight. Then have to show them how it
works. Unwrap the wires from around the flashlight, unclip the
alligator clips and you've got a continuity tester about ten feet
long.

We're starting on the other wheel when the neighbors fire up their
engine, the electrical problem apparently solved. A little later they
shut it down, bring back my flashlight and we chat for a while before
they go off to fly. I re-wind the wires, roll the big o-ring over them
to keep them in place.

It's a little past noon when we finish the job, clean up and put the
tools away. We've been keeping an eye on the wind because the strip
is sorta east & west, the wind wasn't and my fee is a bit of free
flight time. The wind has picked up but my friend decides we're good
to go so we evict the mice, pull the wing covers and go flying. We
buzz over to another field about twenty minutes away where the wind is
pretty much right down the middle of the strip. After bouncing the
wheels a few times we decide the new tires are working okay and take
the bird back home.

After slipping on the wing covers and doing the paper-work we discuss
getting some covers for the wheels, probably a good idea and sure to
please the little brown and white field mice that are becoming
something of a problem. Then my friend asks:

"How's that flashlight-thing work?"

I dig it out, take it apart and show him the piece of double-sided
circuit board that fits under the batteries, down on top of the
bed-spring. It has got to be the world's cheapest flashlight - - one
of those one-piece jobbies where you unscrew the lens and drop the
batteries down the hole. To turn it into a continuity tester you
thread a couple of wires through a hole you drill in the bottom. One
wire is about two feet long, the other about eight. One wire is
soldered to the bed-spring side of the circuit board, the other is lead
though a small hole in the center of the circuit board and soldered to
the top side. Turn the flashlight on, nothing happens. Unless you
connect the two wires. Put a pair of alligator clips on the wires,
wind the wires around the flashlight and you've always got a
continuity tester handy.

"I've never seen that," he sez.

"That's because you've never been caught without a continuity
tester," I laugh, and tell him about the neat little sign in VA-214's
electrical shop at Moffet Field, back when they were still flying
Spads: 'Mothers are a Necessary Invention.' He doesn't get it
but smiles anyway. Back then we used a couple of pieces of shim brass
separated by a circle of tarred cardboard from an ammo can, the usual
flashlight being a one-cell jobbie salvaged from an over-age May West.

-R.S.Hoover