Waves.ky » Uncategorized

Wing Tape Sucks

Gareth Farrington — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:20:58 +0000

As I’m posting this I have just come back from the third sortie with the Magpie. She is flying great on the slow flyer wing. Landings are easy and she will fly hands off at a little under half throttle. The rest of this post I wrote about a week ago as I was finishing up the construction phase:

It took 3+ hours of my life to cover the Slow Fly wing. I’m going to do the sport wing in Solite (Nelson Litefilm) because I do not want to work with this stuff again. Its an exercise in frustration.

The tape sticks to itself, it sticks to you and everything else. It rips very easily once you start to cut into it. It sticks to the scissors and the knife to stop you from making a clean cut. It refuses to go around corners and will peel away from sharp bends. Its virtually impossible to cover a convex shape unless you use a million little strips.

I guess its only saving grace is that its cheap, $3 per roll. Just one roll would cover the entire airplane but I got 4 to have some different colours to work with. You also need 3M77 adhesive spray, that will lighten your wallet by another $16. Admittedly though Solite would be more expensive. You need tools, an iron and a heat gun. Each roll will set you back about $11. I have read that Solite is very sticky too, who knows, it may be just as bad.

So with the wing finished its on the final assembly. Pushrods, soldering connectors, installing radio gear and making up the landing gear, set the CG, charge, test… go fly!

Software I Use

Gareth Farrington — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 11:18:04 +0000

I’m about to reformat my computer so I made a list of everything I need to reinstall. You might find some of this usefull.

Internet

Firefox Web Browser and first thing on the system. One of the reasons I don’t run anti virus.
The Google Toolbar
Thunderbird E-mail. Another reason not to run anti virus.
Mozilla Backup Save your favorites, cookies and email
BitTorrent The original is still the best
Trillian Talk to AOL & MSN form one client
GrabIt Binary News reader
Win SCP Secure FTP client
Putty Secure Shell client

Audio/Video

Winamp Best music player ever, library sucks
iTunes/Quicktime Good music library
Irfanview Opens any Image file
Picasa Organize your digital photos

Editors

Notepad 2 A basic editor with syntax highlighting & regular expression support
Blog Jet Edit blog posts
Open Office 2.0 Does what Microsoft Office does, for free, plus it makes PDF’s

Tools

ISO Recorder Burn ISO’s easily
Ahead Nero Burns everything else. Not Free
DAMN nfo Viewer see nfo files as intended by the author
Win RAR Unpack most any type of archive, particularly zip & rar
Quick Par verify/repair downloads with par files, check sfv files

Fall Comes to Melbourne

Gareth Farrington — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:43:08 +0000

Its the first day of Fall in Melbourne. Its fairly easy to tell when this is if you have lived here for a while. The leaves don’t change colour here but the change is in the air. The leaves don’t change colour in Cayman either but there we only have 2 seasons, hot and windy. Here its fall when you get a suddenly cool and windy day that is in stark contract to the stale oppressive heat and afternoon showers of summer. Its good weather for being outside. The temp is ~82 and humidity is down to 67%. Yea thats still hot to some but its nice down here. Enjoy the day.

Stay Tuned

Gareth Farrington — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 04:10:47 +0000

I’m looking at my folder of unfinished posts and there are some 12 entries in there that I haven’t finished editing. have something to say about BitTorrent + RSS and why that is not a maximally efficient combination, yet, and how to make it work. I just got my Tactile Pro keyboard in and I’m going to do a review of that. I’ve got some ideas to do with some very basic UI concepts and how they no longer make sense in a computer with multiple input devices, sound cards and video displays. I even have a recipe for Curry Chicken that i promised to Walton many moons ago. Look for these items coming this week.