Strapping Yarn #3

Joy of deepest joys, our motors are back where they truly belong, in alignment with the booms.

And there's more, invert the boat and even the props clear the floor and can be left in place whilst the skis are attended to. If at this stage you're not feeling warm inside, then see a general practitioner at your soonest convenience. You need feel no shame in doing so; I took my own son as a very small child to be looked at when he wasn't responding to normal stimuli like triple-expansion steam-engines in ways that I would expect.

The only lining that's not silver in all this is that the booms had to be foreshortened further, which hurt more than losing part of my penis.

IKEA would also fit a dowel between boom and power-bar, but as I'm not IKEA we won't be doing so any time soon.

Strapping Yarn #2

You're asking me why I do not settle for a single bracket in support of the power-bar, and I say unto you: 'Hast though lifted thy motors into place to see them drop unto the floor when thou turnest for the screw-driver?'

And the blog-readers went from that place, sore amazed.

Strapping Yarn #1

With the rubber door-stops fitted we cannot wait to flip the boat over and in fact it is what we need to do now to modify the motor-mounts. Take one 4" steel strap ~ it may be known as a mending plate in different areas of the world ~ and allowing room for the width of the power-bar, apply it to the underside.

Top tip, do offset this to the outer edge of the boom so that the subsequent can be offset to the inner-side such that we never need to use a nut and bolt, as per my foremost commandment: 'Thou shalt know neither bolt nor harlot.'

Raise Your Game

Here's what I mean, with rubber door-stops fitted where the lift-motors would be on this the planing-performance prototype. You can purchase four on our merch pages for just 199 Euros the set, incidentally, where they appear as LIFT-MOTOR SUBS in a range of colours.

You can see I've had to remove the power-bar from the back-end as the stops do not raise the boat sufficiently when inverted to clear the motors until such time as we mod the way these are mounted... prototyping being a game of whack-a-mole.

Nonetheless I'm delighted with how these look and ask my people to stop whatever it is they are doing, and join me in the company song:

You raise me up, so I can clear the speed-controllers,

You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas,

I am strong when I am on your door-stops,

You raise me up, to more than I can be.

© Brian Kennedy, adapted and arranged for kazoo by Colin Hilton.

Side Order

Watching a vid about the first of the RNs Type 45 frigates, destroyers or whatever the moniker, which has been ~ if I have this right ~ in use for 2300 hours and in maintenance for 3300. Although it might be the other way round, but then again it's cost us a billion pounds to get right apparently because upon entry into service they discovered that when operated in temperatures above 28°C, the turbine generators failed and plunged the ship into darkness. Bear in mind that's cold in the Caribbean where it has apparently spent the bulk of its time when not tied up.

And this is where drones differ from destroyers ~ the one inordinately expensive to develop, build and maintain and therefore produced in a rapidly shrinking inventory; another needing to be quick, cheap and easy to develop and deploy with operational feedback soonest; whilst requiring little in the way of training or human resource of any kind.

Accordingly one of my own personal fetishes involves building nothing that cannot be set on end or on its side for maintenance or storage. And you can't do that with a frigate, can you? But I've looked at drones from all sides now, from up and down and still somehow, of drone delusions I recall I sometimes*

Therefore today's lesson, if you can turn to the blog provided, is to modify the craft to enable it to be inverted too. We'll do that by adding rubber-doorstops where once lift-motors might be, and by adjusting the position of the cruise-motors so as to facilitate the operation.

'Why, oh why, oh why?' I hear you saying as you pause your latte mid-air. Because it's the easiest way to fit, remove or replace the underslung skis.

It's learning by doing, as Dutch airline 'Vbird' told me they'd do before going bust.

* Ed. Stop that now... it's not big, and it's not clever.

Hangar Rush

Come across upon my travels something I instantly recognise with the aid of Google as the Type-C hangar of my youth; here at RAF Sealand as was, then at Finningley. 

Developed during the 1930s, it's got Art Deco written all over it, although later they dropped the brick cladding with the monstrous carbuncle that became the Type-C1.

Some among them enjoy the protection of a Grade II heritage listing, although not the one seen here sadly.

Once playing a role in aircraft repairs, now it is home to a paper-recycling plant but leaving I still call out 'Chocks away, last one back's a sissy... whoooof!'.

Ed. You can follow the author's career as a cadet pilot on LinkedIn, simply searching for 'Air Vice Marshall Sir Colin Hilton DFC'.

Steam Punk

Drop a container-load at a site where the side-hustle is restoring our steam heritage and during a tour of the workshop ~ as a high-priest of maritime dronery ~ get to enter the Holy of Holies.

Here amidst the incense of smouldering anthracite and oils is no less than that steam-roller restored to its former glory by the inestimable man himself, Bolton's finest, and hands together if you would now ladies and gentlemen for Fred Dibnah?

Fred's fame abroad extends to fans like the esteemed Rahmi Koc, himself founder of a business empire and the owner and patron of a transport museum in old Istanbul.

So with the atmosphere hushed, only the rhythmic knocking of a milling-machine breaking the quietude, I doff my own flat-cap in silent homage to the master.