Chronic's Research and Aeronautics Project (C.R.A.P.)

TheChronicOne · July 27, 2020, 11:12:38 AM

Quote from: reddfoxx on July 27, 2020, 08:51:12 AM
We bought our Element from a dealer, and they said "it needs the recall done." I asked why they hadn't just done it, and they shrugged their shoulders. Called Honda, and they were floored- "I think it's illegal for them to sell it like that. Bring it in right away." Luckily, I work at Honda, so I just dropped it at the service center at our plant. They gave me a natural gas Civic as a loaner. Had enough gas in it; I was a little worried about refilling...

Interesting.... I'm going to look into that again... that it might have been illegal... That could be why original owner didn't say anything and probably why neither the seller or myself knew about it.

Natural gas? That's cool but yeah..... not nearly as many places to fill it up. My pops once had his truck converted over to run on Propane... this was way back in the early mid 90s. It was cool and cheaper but man the damn thing stunk when running. lol

PR19_Kit · July 27, 2020, 12:42:27 PM

When I retired in 2008 I bought a DualFuel car which ran on petrol (gasoline...) and LPG, which is propane in the UK. Primarily it was because LPG was only half the price of petrol and the fuel consumption was only a tiny bit worse when running on LPG, maybe 3% worse, so Mrs_PR19 and I could travel twice as far for the same money.

Luckily in our part of the country there's a chain of LPG retailers with remote filling sites so we could fuel up at any time, but elsewhere in the country you needed a gudie book, which I had of course. In the Netherlands almost EVERRY fuel station sold LPG I found, but I needed an adaptor to get the pipe to fit my car.

As it always started on petrol, it needed both tanks, with the result that the car would run almost 650 miles before needing to re-fuel.

Getting it serviced was a nightmare though. The dealers steadily lost interest and had fewer and fewer staff who knew how they worked, and before I scrapped it my 'local' dealer was 60 miles away!

Why did I scrap it? you ask.......

On the way home one day the LPG ECU and the petrol ECU decided not to talk to each other and they BOTH fed fuel to the engine at once.

Result.....BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

It blew half the cylinder head clean off the engine, taking the bonnet (hood...) with it. Amazingly it still ran on two cylinders, well enough for me to take it a mile to my tame garage guy. The next day he said he was half way down the list of parts it needed, and it was already above £3000, so that was the end of that.

Rheged · July 27, 2020, 02:13:03 PM

I'll stick to my diesel, thank you. 65 mpg (73 on a long run) and at least 800 miles range.

PR19_Kit · July 27, 2020, 03:01:46 PM

I'm sure many people will say that, but I can't live with diesels.

No matter if they're Euro 359 compliant or if they're a 1965 Perkins 4/99, the exhaust fumes trigger my asthma, so I avoid driving behind them, or driving one myself.

TheChronicOne · July 27, 2020, 04:51:34 PM

Quote from: PR19_Kit on July 27, 2020, 12:42:27 PM
When I retired in 2008 I bought a DualFuel car which ran on petrol (gasoline...) and LPG, which is propane in the UK. Primarily it was because LPG was only half the price of petrol and the fuel consumption was only a tiny bit worse when running on LPG, maybe 3% worse, so Mrs_PR19 and I could travel twice as far for the same money.

Luckily in our part of the country there's a chain of LPG retailers with remote filling sites so we could fuel up at any time, but elsewhere in the country you needed a gudie book, which I had of course. In the Netherlands almost EVERRY fuel station sold LPG I found, but I needed an adaptor to get the pipe to fit my car.

As it always started on petrol, it needed both tanks, with the result that the car would run almost 650 miles before needing to re-fuel.

Getting it serviced was a nightmare though. The dealers steadily lost interest and had fewer and fewer staff who knew how they worked, and before I scrapped it my 'local' dealer was 60 miles away!

Why did I scrap it? you ask.......

On the way home one day the LPG ECU and the petrol ECU decided not to talk to each other and they BOTH fed fuel to the engine at once.

Result.....BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

It blew half the cylinder head clean off the engine, taking the bonnet (hood...) with it. Amazingly it still ran on two cylinders, well enough for me to take it a mile to my tame garage guy. The next day he said he was half way down the list of parts it needed, and it was already above £3000, so that was the end of that.

Ho lee crap!

Rick Lowe · July 28, 2020, 01:20:32 AM

Yeah, I was running an old Valiant one time, on petrol/CNG*.

Which was fine, until I decided to keep running it on gas only cos it was cheaper... that's when I found out why they recommended a 3:1 usage ratio of gas:petrol.
The gas burns hotter, y'see, and after a while it burned out the carburetor float.

So when I switched back over to petrol she died on me... opened the lid to find petrol streaming out of the carb onto the exhaust manifold (inlet & exhaust on the same side of the 225 slant 6)

Slammed the lid down again, sat and cranked until the petrol was out of the fuel line, switched back to gas and took her straight into the shop!

I really do seem to give my guardian angel plenty to do!

*oops - wrong fuel!

zenrat · July 28, 2020, 04:18:24 AM

My last three cars before the current one were dual fuel and I also had a work ute on gas.
LPG is ideally suited to Australia. Long distances, low maximum speed limits and locally made cars with large, low revving engines (OK, so you can scratch the last one due to the shortsighted idiocy of a previous government).

As well as an increase in consumption with LPG you also get a decrease in performance. And, in all my dual fuel cars an increase in backfires. The last one, a Falcon ute, was named Napoleon because a particularly bad run of backfires (needed new plugs and air filter) led to the plastic induction tubing being "Blownapart"...

I was recommended to run a tank full of petrol through the engine every four tanks of gas in order to "wet the seals".

PR19_Kit · July 28, 2020, 05:04:15 AM

The performance loss on my DualFuel Zafira was only just measurable when it was on LPG, maybe 0.5 second in the 0-60 time.

Perhaps it's not so marked with a smaller, faster revving engine? The Zaf had a 1.8 litre DOHC four, and made peak power around 5500 rpm.

scooter · July 28, 2020, 06:38:27 AM

When I was still in the Air Guard (and in charge of my squadron's vehicles), my squadron took possession of two crew cab pickups from the 111th FW at NAS Willow Grove PA. One was the typical Ford diesel, the other a dual fuel (Gas/LPG) Chevy, with the LPG cell in the bed. The problem, being, unlike Willow Grove, which had an LPG plant on base, ACY *doesn't*. If we wanted to fuel it with LPG, we would have had to take one of the off-base fueling cards from Transportation, and bring it to the only county-run facility. I love bureaucratic snafus, like that.

TheChronicOne · July 28, 2020, 10:30:31 AM

I think I'm learning to never mess with this stuff and stick with just guzzoline. I don't even use the E-85 petrol/ethanol mix because of stuff like this and I always implore people not to even use it in their lawn equipment. In fact, some manufacturers are starting to put diagrams on stuff now with a circle and slash through a gas jug with "E-85" on it.

Here's an interesting thought... I wonder if some of this type of stuff with the degredation of seals and all that could be mitigated with additives sort of like dumping two stroke oil into gas for two stroke engines. Of course.... you'd think engineers and scientists would have already tried that. Hell, as far as that go, I swear I remember seeing a product that is pretty much just that... some stuff you add to E-85 fuel to keep it from being so nasty. Of course, I don't mess with E85 anyway so I didn't pay much attention but I seem to recall seeing it.....

Might try the F-86 today.

TheChronicOne · July 28, 2020, 08:54:12 PM

I'm not even sure what happened to make it happen but I wound up working on my F-86 finally. I've also been inspired recently by things I've been seeing.....

OK, so first off, I got back into the F-86. I had to sit here and research things about the paint job to re-acquaint myself and then did the same to the model itself.... after that I started painting stuff. I'm on track again... for sure. I'm looking forward to working on it again after mowing lawns and stuff.

NEXT UP.... future plans. Anyone seen this yet? https://www.africanmilitaryblog.com/2019/08/libya-frankenstein-mig-23-flogger-fighter-jet-take-flight?v=65d8f7baa677&fbclid=IwAR3Nci02RrnHn25E3pKA1HUl_qpEHw3dPJaLMqjMrUgH2H8iZ0hucVkMsAU So the Libyans made a Flogger out of Floggers. This whole thing isn't exactly unique as the article may suggest but it still provide a very interesting subject as it is before they paint it. In fact, they may have by now. This article is about a year old. Making a model of it with all the mis-matched paint work would be sweet, though. I wonder if there are more/better pics of it in that state? I haven't bothered looking for myself yet.

Don't glance too swiftly; some of the colors are similar/same but the camo patterns are different for sure.

That port side wing has some weird "splotch" crap going on... fuselage is "stripey." Right side wing is obviously some sort of grey or whatever.... pretty neat.

Next up.. I saw this. Iraqi naval MiG-21.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/jamescommissionbuilds/posts/2487495981542699

James' Modelling and Commissions

"Go and check out Scale Aviation Modeller International's latest edition! It features many great articles in this new and improved version of the magazine and among the pages, (page 24) is my 1:72 Italeri (Fujimi) MiG-21bis in Iraqi Navy colours circa 1986. I've post this build here before but here are some images I may not have shared before. Enjoy! (Y)
Leave a like and a follow to keep up to date with my latest builds, next projects, modelling news, commissions and much more! (Y) ✈️

Well... that's pretty damn cool..... OK.. so here are the pics from the post:

OK, I have to interrupt right here. .... I love COLORS. I always talk about colors of y'alls models... sometimes I'll ignore the PE thing you spent 350 hours on to compliment the colors... so what I'm getting at is that overall scheme and colors is important to me. This stuff really strikes my fancy. Why haven't I seen this before?! And look at that bottom one.. I'm not sure how accurate those are but that's a decidely PURPLE color in the mix and purple has been a bit of a holy grail trying to find in actual in service combat vehicles and honestly it's not even all that common in civil stuff.

On with the show:

Pretty sweet! I rather strongly dislike the "panel lines" but I'm all about the colors, scheme, and novelty of the whole thing. I think I will try to make this for myself and do it in *MY* style of building and painting.

Next, I've decided that doing a "mystery project" would be stupid and probably cause confusion so I'll just be out with it: I've been thinking of making a USAF Thunderbirds A-10. The "Thunderbrrrrt."

I've also picked up and looked at my PSA Tristar and am considering getting on with that one as well. I've messed up the paint work pretty bad but from a distance it looks pretty good so I'm just going to chalk it up as yet another class of "Airliner Modelling University" and finish it off and hope that the next time I have to mask and paint multiple curves that I won't mess it up so bad thanks to the lessons learned on this one.

So that's that. Plans for now and plans for the future.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot! Last week when I busted me arse cleaning out that shed that ol boy stood me up on I unearthed these:

Some of the stuff has split apart but some CA will tighten it all back up. This is good. These may look like cheap garbage to some but these simple synthetic bristle brushes have proven to be invaluable for me when painting with the water acrylic paints I use. Pretty neat find.

Rick Lowe · July 29, 2020, 01:19:03 AM

Nice to find spares you'd forgotten all about.

zenrat · July 29, 2020, 03:23:37 AM

I like the profile MiG, the model slightly less so. But it's still pretty neat.

NARSES2 · July 29, 2020, 06:25:06 AM

I saw that Mig this morning when my copy of SAMI dropped through the letterbox, it is a neat scheme, but I just found the thought of an Iraqi naval air arm slightly incongruous when you look at the length of their coastline ? Then I read the historical bits in the review and it made a bit more sense.

TheChronicOne · August 01, 2020, 08:40:24 PM

Without having read the article, I will say that , "The less coastline you have, the more vehemently you wish to keep and defend it."

There's a lot of very interesting history about squabbles over states having access to shipping lanes. I just assume that's the reasoning for it but I'm just guessing. It makes for some fascinating border lines as well.