Hail to the Victors!

Being from Michigan, I have a large portion of Michigan related clothing. The most impressive though is my collection of MICHIGAN t-shirts. Most of these are gifts from my aunt and uncle who live in Michigan and keep we well supplied. In case you are wondering, VAMOS AZUL means GO BLUE in Spanish... I get a lot of weird looks when I wear that one, but such is the price for supporting the Maze and Blue!

Flaps, bolts, and grinders?

For those of you who wonder what makes the flaps go up and down on small airplanes, here is a picture of the flap motor and transmission assembly. The electric motor provides the force and the transmission converts the spinning motion of the motor into horizontal movement which pushes the flaps either up or down.

Here is a picture of one of three bolts which connects the wing to the airplane. This one happens to be installed backwards which puts the tail of the bolt and the nut to close to control cables!

After turning the bolt around this is the end you should see, the head of the bolt.

But if the tail of a bolt is to long and gets in the way of things like the flap follow-up cable, you can take a grinder and cut it off.

But sometimes its the other kind of heads, the goofy ones, that you have to worry about the most!

New Paint!

The project Cessna 206 has new paint! We have painted it to look like our other wheel plane so that as we blaze through the skies at 140 miles per hour out planes will be a blur of white and red!

It came out really well without any runs in the paint. I leaned that in Spanish the work for "paint run" is a word the use that means "curtain". Which is pretty accurate!

Now if we could just get people to take their job seriously and get back to work we would be done soon!

Three wheeled tractor

In the spirit of the 3 wheeled motocars which are so prevalent here in Pucallpa. I took some pictures of our three wheeled Massey Ferguson tractor. This the work horse that keeps our runways and taxi ways mowed.

Unfortunately there were were brakes on the left side so stopping was getting pretty exciting. Its back in service as of this blog post. Although now the PTO (power take off) clutch is not releasing... that means splinting the tractor in half to get at that thing. Anybody know a good tractor mechanic that wants to come down and work on it?