Camp Fire Stories

[210TC]

Go ahead A64

[a64pilot]

BTW, you have multiple airplanes right? I bet Moultrie Ga. is just right next door to a Harmon rocket. I'd love to see the rocket too. What's that not enough space for gear? Well you can just ship that to me and we can ship it back to you after the fly-in. Whatever you come up with (almost), I can come up with a solution for.

[210TC]

I wanna hear about the ford truck...
Lots of baggage space, Notice I didn't say camping gear?
Your not going to believe this however, the rocket will land sooooooooooo
short it could park next to a Maule with it's chin up. It just has real small feet and can't handle ruts.
I hope the rocket is sold soon, I just dropped the price 10,000.00, then goes the aero commander. I'm starting to get VERY uneasy with all the cost and I have one sitting in Cape May, N.J. to fix up.
Time for some fishin

[a64pilot]

Anyhow, it was the early 70's and we were building a beach house in Alligator point Fl. Which meant you left every Friday with a 3/4 ton truck full of about 2 tons of building supplies for Fl. Well the Arabs got tired of us white folk stealing all of their oil and decided to embargo it. So depending on what your tag number was you could only buy gas every other weekend or day or something. I don't remember the details and am not one for the details getting in the way of a story anyway.
When you could buy gas was restricted, but not how much gas you could buy. Well we had to have the bed free to put the two tons of building supplies in, so my Father had "saddle bag" tanks installed. These were about 20 gallon or so tanks installed on the outside of the frame rail in front of the rear wheels. No one had yet been sued for mounting tanks there. In the 70's it wasn't uncommon to have the gas tank inside the truck with you behind your back. I really don't understand how we survived those days without all the bicycle helmets, knee pads, mouth guards etc. I digress, sorry
Anyway you had a floor mounted tank valve like in an aircraft that would select tanks and you would switch the fuel indicator with a three way toggle switch on the dashboard. Pretty neat system, but my father would always run the tank dry before he would switch over to the other tank. It didn't ever seem to cause any problems in any of the aircraft he owned, they would get a little rough, he would switch tanks, the engine would pick right back up and drive on.
The truck didn't do that, maybe because of traffic, he couldn't switch tanks fast enough or maybe because of the automatic transmission it wouldn't "windmill" until it caught back up. The truck engine would die in place. To get it started again required copious amounts of grinding away on the starter. So much so that starters were a temporary accessory in that truck. After changing two starters, I decided to get smart and get an electric fuel pump. I got a Holley fuel pump at the local speed shop. It looked exactly like the fuel transfer pump in a Maule except for the word Holley on it. Any way the beauty of this pump was that it made a heck of a racket when it was sucking air which would alert you to switch tanks.

To be continued

[a64pilot]

OK this pump would make three different sounds, two of which we hear in the Maules. The rattle when it's sucking air, a purr when it's pumping fuel and when there is head pressure and very little flow it will slow down to a tick.
Several years go by and this truck is now old and relegated pretty much to farm duty. It had an oil bath air cleaner, remember those? if you do then you just dated yourself. Anyway over the years this filter finally clogged to the point the truck wouldn't run. One of the masterful mechanics we had on the farm decided that if it wouldn't run with it then the obvious answer was to remove it.
The fuel pump was wired into the ignition so that whenever there was ignition power there was power to the pump, so start up always sounded like this, key to run and the pump would purr for a couple of seconds until pressure was built up, then it would tick and you could start the truck. Of course being carburated you could start it right away, but I always waited and listened to the pump.
Well we are rebuilding the old farm house, The one I and my family now live in by the way and for some reason the truck is parked right beside the house. One of the men jumped in the truck to drive it away and apparently flooded it trying to start it. It backfired and started on fire. Now pilots and most farm people know that if you have a carburator fire to open the throttle fully and engage the starter and suck the fire into the engine. A fire in the engine won't hurt anything, it's when it get's loose that it becomes a problem. The man realized he had an underhood fire so he jumped out and opened the hood. Mistake #2, now the fire had a good supply of oxygen. By now everyone had rallyed around the truck and begun trying to put out the fire by throwing dirt on it. We were winning the battle and the fire was beginning to subside, that's when I heard the pump stop ticking and begin to purr. I knew instantly what that meant, I had heard it so many times. The fire had burned through the fuel line and the little pump was pumping at full flow. In only a couple of seconds we had a HUGE fire and the house was going to be lost as well. Luckily the backhoe was near and I was able to use it to push the truck away from the house enough to maybe not lose the house if it didn't explode.
The pump was mounted to the frame and pretty well protected, the truck had at least 55 gl of gas in it and the fire had grown to engulf the entire front half of the truck and the flames seemed to be about 30 or so feet high. The whole time you could hear that little pump purr right along and the fire just get bigger and bigger. It burned until, I believe the wiring burnt out and removed power from the pump. The truck didn't explode, I don't know why it didn't, there was fire under the fuel tanks. Just about everything burned, even the front tires. The truck was of course totaled.

[Lowflybye]

Now that is some funny stuff right there...I could just picture it in my head which made it even funnier.

[210TC]

Did you check the pump to see if it works...................LOL.....could be...

[210TC]

We were working on an old corvette with side draft injection, the first one installed back in the late 5o's or early 60's.
My sisters boyfriend had his head near the intake of this thing while we were cranking it attempting to get it started. I think he was turning the distributor with one hand and ca-bang it back-fired. He jerked his head up and his face was missing eye brows, when he exhailed smoke came out his nose.

[a64pilot]

Those are the times you wish you had a camera. The blowing smoke out of his nose would have been the coup de grace.

[yellowbelly]

A64

See what I mean?? Those pumps can come through the fires of hell. Why should I worry about letting mine run dry for an hour? Or even a week???

Great story

YB

[a64pilot]

YB,
I'm sure it can. I was just trying to side with David because I believe running a pump dry will shorten it's life. Now these pumps may be good for a very long time, but I think that time will be less if run dry often. We do a lot of things that may be unnecessary with aircraft. I wouldn't consider starting my aircraft with the avionics master on, but it doesn't seem to bother the electronics in my car for example. Probably wouldn't kill the avionics either, at least not immedately, but I bet it would shorten their life.
For me it's hard to justify the cost of pleasure flying, it's expensive. I think though if you follow a few tips from experienced mechanics, it get's a little cheaper, because you buy fewer parts. For example. I had an old time crop duster tell me to turn slow on the ground, He said that the prop of course is a big gyroscope and spinning around quickly plays hell on the foward bearing of the engine. Now I don't know if this is true or not, but it makes sense, doesn't cost a nickel to do what he say's and who knows, he might be right. Or mount your landing light so that the filiment is vertical and not horizontal. The theory there is that shocks blow a lot of bulbs, most shocks to airplanes are of course vertical and a vertical filiment can resist the shocks better. Who knows, it sounds plausible and if it works, it will save me some money.

[210TC]

A64
You mentioned an old man told you that turning on the ground was hard on the front thrust bearing in the engine do to the prop gyro effect.
I had an avionics guy tell me that tail draggers are very hard on gyro instruments. He said after we shut them down we have a tendency to move the tail around rapidly and this shortens the life of the gyro. He said we should let our gyro's spool down before we try to move our planes around. I think he also was trying to say that we spin our airplanes around much faster than tricycle birds on the ground.
This fella had some good military background.
It's one of those "I JUST DON'T KNOW" but sounds good.

[a64pilot]

David,
The little OH-58 helicopter's gyros were all electric. We always turned the battery on to keep the gyros spooled for just that reason when we pulled em into the hanger after a flight.

[RobBurson]

when he exhailed smoke came out his nose.

Thinking of stuff coming out the nose.

Being at the fire station sometimes is like a bunch of 7th graders in the school cafeteria. Picture eating lunch or dinner and cracking jokes.

After 27 years at the fire dept I have see guys blow jello, milk, and spaghetti out there nose. Kinda gross but funny too. Cheers...Rob

[210TC]

The first one who can tell us the location of my new picture wins a bottle of wine or a six pack (coke or beer).