Scudrunners

I like old stuff.  If it survived long enough to be old chances are the folks who made it had a good idea what they were doing.  I figure if the manufacturer specified a metal gasket don't use a fibre one, and so on.  My personal exception is I like castellated nuts a lot more than peened or punched hardware though even those have their place.

I've had to tidy up some "improvements" before that made old things either immediately useless or converted them to time bombs and luckily haven't killed anyone yet.  Today's project is to put cotter pins where someone else had used too-thin safety wire which had allowed a little movement and eventually valve rocker failure.  Luckily no one was hurt but this job right now feels a bit like being a proctologist doing a root canal.

Doing it right > doing it twice.

Fuck me sideways. I hate seeing that.

My Stinson had those sort of malarkey done jobs. Took about a year through the first annual to replace and redo what I can only guess the previous owner tried doing.

Guy I know had a C421 with turbine conversion. Lost a cotter pin in the landing gear,
it was trashed during the landing.

Expensive cotter pin. People like to install under-sized ones, because it's easier.

Old account presently broken, but this week’s job has been to replace a bunch of pop rivets with real ones. They may have been airplane grade (don’t know, don’t care) but they sure were ugly.