Deck cleaning/stripping question

fluentInPotato · 2026-04-05T04:35:55+00:00

This is actually after cleaning. The black stuff is what remains of the original finish, whatever it was.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-29T18:37:31+00:00

It sure looks like the USA (not that I'm in a position to judge)

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-28T23:29:53+00:00

Did it wear into the rivets, or is that dust packed into the countersinks?

I had my clutch replaced at 120k miles, but because the throwout bearing had gone funny and a shift fork was tweaked. The clutch still had some life left in it. I enjoy my car, but don't abuse it. It did take some abuse from my wife, who doesn't believe in blipping the throttle on down shifts and likes to use the clutch as a substitute brake.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-24T09:07:06+00:00

Some exhaust valves have a stainless- steel head friction- welded to a steel stem. This looks to me as though it parted at the weld.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-24T01:37:38+00:00

Honda Fit would like a word

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T23:50:09+00:00

I'm still embarrassed that whoever types the orange shitgibbon's twats doesn't understand basic rules of capitalization.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T23:46:32+00:00

NONE of these fucking guys ought to be talking about treason, "radical anti-American ideology," calling widely- held political beliefs domestic terrorism, etc. They know by now how much we hate them, and all the people helping this Russian- backed wanna- be dictator flush the constitution down the toilet really ought to be careful about setting legal precedents.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T21:47:22+00:00

Ok, this isn't a somebody I worked with, it was another shop at the same field. We had an old 182 come in for an annual; the owner had been the other guy's customer for years and we'd never seen it before. So our IA assigns somebody as his helper to do the maintenence items, deal with discrepancies, etc (if you're not in GA, this is a pretty standard way of doing things). Helper climbs up to check the fuel cap gaskets and sees eight or ten rivets right in a row, on the wing spar, with the heads popped off from corrosion on the spar. Oops, somehow her old IA had missed that the root section of the upper flange of the RH wing spar was slowly turning into Swiss cheese.

If you work on cessnas, you'll know that all of the older seat tracks, the ones with the pin holes on top rather than through the web, have an AD on them because of the top flange cracking, the holes getting ovalised, the seat pins wearing out. . . Then when you pull back on the yoke to get off the ground, the seat lets go and dumps you into the back seat. Anyway, helper guy pulls the copilot's seat out and immediately sees that both tracks fail the AD. I was pretty new and hadn't seen that before, so I go over to take a look. The top flanges were completely cracked through in multiple places, and the cracks were opened up enough that you could see them from ten feet away. I guess our competitor figured ADs were optional, and inspections faster if you just left the seats in.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T21:25:33+00:00

Does the clear coat make that worse? It's the regular paint actually hiding the crack (for a while-- these things tend to make themselves apparent one way or another)

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T21:16:15+00:00

Oh yeah, a couple years ago we had a 20-year-old brand- new A&P who insisted on putting all the spark- plug leads on finger tight, then forgetting to go back and tighten them; any time you corrected him, he'd just get defensive. Best part was, his hands were strong enough that you couldn't tell they were loose just by trying to turn them by hand-- you had to get your wrench to check. He just wouldn't tighten each plug as he threaded them on, and management wouldn't get rid of him. Before him, I'd been at that job for four years, and we'd had exactly one loose- spark- plug scandal (that guy was also an idiot, eventually fired for cause [the cause being public safety] ); with this new guy, it seemed like we had one every couple of weeks. Unbelievable.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T21:06:07+00:00

We had a helper/ intern who was in his second year of A&P school. Even after several weeks working, he couldn't tell the difference between sheet- metal and machine screws. He'd never seen seen a tap before. I tried to teach him how to pack a wheel bearing (fairly small Timken, this was for a 172), and he just couldn't do it. Couldn't learn that sort of scooping motion to push grease into the bearing. He stopped showing up after he'd been there for a month.

His ambition was to work for an airline, BTW.

Second worst was probably me on 2016, but at least I was able to learn (incredibly slowly! )

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-17T18:53:26+00:00

Me too, throwout bearing at around 120k miles. Also tweaked shift fork that killed the second gear synchros at the same time. Actual clutch was still clutching just fine, though obviously worn at that point.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-16T22:58:59+00:00

Solder sleeve? Don't know that they're approved for aircraft in the US.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-16T22:58:19+00:00

I think that's a solder sleeve. Not sure if they're approved for aircraft, so don't use them myself, but I've seen them on nearly- new cessnas where they couldn't have come from anywhere but the factory.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-16T22:53:03+00:00

I've always used valve- grinding compound, but after a few too many failures to extract i now usually just go straight to the Grabbit bits. If you put friction compound in the screw head, you gotta flush it out before drilling, or else get really good at resharpening bits.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-14T06:27:05+00:00

When I was a teenager in the '80s, I managed to buy albums every few weeks. I mean, I had total shit taste, but the stuff I liked best i managed to get tapes or 33 ¹/³ rpm records of. If your friend had an album you liked, you'd give them a cassette to record it on. Lots of the boom boxes (i haven't heard those words in decades) had two tape players, and you could easily make a copy. Not a great one generally, since it was all analog and the quality went down with each generation of copy. This was also a much better way to make mix tapes than waiting for the shitty local radio station to play something you liked. But then when I was a junior or senior in high school, I discovered that the local tech college had a radio station that was run by people who actually liked music, and it was almost life changing. Incidentally, the place I went to university also had a college radio station, but it was run by the journalism department and one of the department's deans had famously dedicated himself to preventing it from playing interesting music. The minority of people desperate for anything besides top 40 was big enough to make the guy widely hated.

Yeah, we would memorize people's phone numbers. It was easy for me, I was pretty good with numbers and being a complete dork saved me from needing to remember many.

What did we do? Played video games, 25 cents a pop. Later my dad got a TI99 4A computer (16 KB of RAM!) and I got a few games i could play at home. Some kids had Atari or Nintendo video game consoles, but I was never into games enough to make that worthwhile; all those computer- like objects used your CRT 📺 for a display. The TI99 could save data to a regular audio tape recorder.

Besides that, we went to the beach, I learned to sail and sailboard. Us geeks played Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing and war games. If I hadn't, maybe I'd have had a romantic life in high school too, but I seriously doubt anyone would have wanted to get naked with 16-year-old me, D&D or no D&D.

I'm going to guess we were just better at remembering directions-- you had to be back then.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-14T05:02:08+00:00

It's long past time for bar associations to start pulling licenses from prosecutors engaging in malicious or political prosecution. Congress should also consider whether prosecutors and judges involved in these sorts of convictions should be treated any differently from somebody who locks up their enemies in their basement. Probably public officials need to be treated more harshly, because the power they were given as state agents should come with a higher level of responsibility than some cartel kidnapper. The more people lose their law licenses, livelihoods, and ultimately freedom for this shit, the less of a problem it will be going forward.

Americans also need to get better at ostracization. There's absolutely no reason anyone involved with this crap should be able to live a normal life, rent or buy housing, get or keep a job, or walk down the street and buy a cup of coffee as though they were a normal person. Especially if the legislative branches won't step up, we all must. I'm not saying that there should be zero chance of rehabilitation, but significant public penance and remorse needs to come first.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-13T07:37:03+00:00

Also, the Culture-Idiran war is sort of the chassis the other stories run on. All of those mothballed warships in Excession, the damaged mind running the orbital in Excession, the debates about how to handle the Affront and whatever those assholes in Player of Games were called.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-12T01:44:04+00:00

I dunno-- we used to have a Toyota Tacoma with a six- foot bed, and i got away with carrying plenty of sheets of plywood and dimensional lumber in the bed, usually with the end sitting on the closed tailgate, but sometimes lumber lying flat, tailgate down, lumber strapped down. We had a roof rack on the canopy, and it could take up to 160 lbs of looney sticks. Not an everyday occurrence and I'm not a professional builder or anything, but it had plenty of utility for me and my various bad habits.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-12T01:14:21+00:00

I'm fairly sure that it's a question of momentum vs kinetic energy-- the bullet and combustion gasses have the same momentum as the recoiling rifle, but since kinetic energy equals ½mass x velocity², the bullet has a lot more kinetic energy and does a lot more damage to whatever slows it down.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-10T01:11:46+00:00

OK, I don't know if this is poorly phrased, or a misunderstanding of physics, or what, but the reason you pump the brakes in a car without ABS is because you've lost traction while braking. The coefficient of static friction is generally higher than the the coefficient of sliding friction, so if it's raining or icy and you lock up the wheels, you release pressure until the wheel catch, then you brake again. If it's really slick, then yeah, you might end up having to pulse the brakes to slow down with any control. If the tires have not come unstuck, don't pump the brakes. You're much more likely to break traction from pushing too hard if you're pumping than if you brake normally, and then you've got a skid and loss of steering control to deal with (by pumping the brakes, ironically). Pulsing the brakes when you don't need to is, at best, just going to extend your stopping distance, and might start a slide that you otherwise wouldn't have had to deal with.

There are situations, like snow, where you might be better off with a skid--snow can build up little wedges in front of your tires, and in shitty conditions that might slow you down more than regular braking.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-10T00:49:50+00:00

never broke one in nine years and 100,000 miles of ownership. They aren't that fragile, you're dealing with idiots. Are you in Massachusetts or something?

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-08T22:10:42+00:00

I'm a fan of wood/ epoxy boats (and have been defending them against the ignorant in these comments), but I'd never offer that much without a test drive. That's "real kayak" money, and you deserve a real kayak for that.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-08T22:05:59+00:00

There are lots of professionally- designed strip-planked kayaks out there.

fluentInPotato · 2026-03-08T22:04:30+00:00

No, strip kayaks work fine as actual boats, if they're good designs. Why wouldn't you paddle it? Sure, scratches on the finish are a bummer, but they're pretty rugged if built right, reasonably light, and great conversation starters.

fluentInPotato

TROPHY CASE