Inaugural crash, squeaky wheel, open for business

When I got home last night I got busy.  First I jumped on the tractor and finished mowing the back half of the back half of the yard, giving it a much more uniform cut than the first time.  I am hoping it is the last time I have to do it in quite awhile as the wet season weather pattern seems to officially be behind us.  Cutting the grass that late in the day is actually a good thing.  The grass is completely dry so all the clippings that pile up on top of the mower deck could be blown away with some brief work with my leaf blower.

While I was out front I pulled out the WD-40 and sprayed a couple points on the Tacoma driveshaft.  You see ever since I bought the truck back in 2000 it had an off and on problem with a horrible sounding metallic squeal that I determined was the driveshaft after much investigation.  During that investigation I found out that my truck was in a pretty serious accident while being driven by the prior owners 16 year old son.  That accident I assumed caused the driveshaft problem and is also the cause of the ugly section of the exterior of the truck where it was repainted poorly.

Well the noise was quite annoying, annoying enough that I eventually bought a used driveshaft to silence the squeal years and years ago.  It worked, for awhile.  In the past couple years the noise has been gradually coming out of retirement, occurring more and more frequently.  Since it is a different driveshaft making the same noise I can only assume it is because something in the factory geometry of the drive train was altered in that accident which over time causes the driveshaft problems.

Now I am certainly not going to put another driveshaft on the truck.  I am however thinking about jacking up the back end, putting it in DRIVE and seeing if I can pinpoint exactly where on the shaft the noise is coming from.  If I can, I’ll see if I can take that area apart and lube the shit out of it.

So since I had a freshly mowed and completely dry flying field behind the house I figured it was a good time to take the Tuffwing out for it’s initial flight.   I eyeballed the ailerons to make sure they looked like they were even and at a small angle upwards so the wing would go up instead of down after launch.

My Speedwing had a small wooden frame/handle on the bottom which I would use to launch it.  The Tuffwing does not have this.  Instead the recommended launch technique is grabbing a wing and sort of flinging it Frisbee style.  I was a bit nervous about launching it in this manner.

I shelved my launch anxiety, powered up my transmitter and plugged the battery for the plane in.  After hearing the series of beeps that indicates you are ready to go, I held the right wing, applied enough throttle where I could feel the plane pulling strongly and gave it a little flick.  Within a half second the plane had barrel rolled left and was upside down.  A split second later it was nose first into the ground where it bounced high off the ground like a super ball.  I killed throttle before it came back down.

The good thing about EPP foam planes is they designed to crash, hard.  Besides some grass stuck to tape I didn’t see any noticeable damage although the prop adapter was a bit loose.  My non-expert flight crash analysis seemed to indicate the plane was trimmed too far left which caused the immediate roll.  I used the trim adapter on the transmitter to compensate right a little bit, hoping it would prevent a repeat impact.

So once again I found myself at launch time.  Again I throttled up, tossed the plane and before I could get both hands on the radio it again had barrel rolled and found it’s way into terra firma, this time impacting in such a way that sent the plane into a cartwheel knocking off one of the glued on wing tips, great.

Well I was annoyed.  I mean the plane was not even close to being stable or gaining altitude.  I will need to repair the wing tip and do some more tweaking of it’s set up.   I am hoping I will be able to get this thing in the air before I push the impact resistance of the EPP foam to it’s breaking point.

The majority of the rest of the night was spent attending to running club and race timing issues.  I did manage to find about 45 minutes to play a little Hearthstone.

Hey the government is open for business today again!  The republicans finally conceded that their ill advised hostage taking of the federal government was doing their cause more harm than good in the big picture.  I am glad the doors are open once again.  Do I wish that the federal government wasn’t 17 TRILLION dollars in debt? Of course.  Do I think I will ever see that debt eliminated in my lifetime? Not a chance.

The bottom line is massive federal debt is a deliberate act, masterminded by those deviously brilliant crooks at the Federal Reserve.  They want the government to owe money, lots of it, it’s good for (their) business.   Short of nuking the planet, I really don’t see any scenario where the corrupt system that is in place can be rebooted.

Today is Cindy’s birthday, wish her a happy one if you see her.