Shop Talk

We’ve come a long way from the Narco Omnigator (vintage 1958 or so) to the latest glass gizmos that do everything except make the...

Many aircraft owners don’t realize that some ELT control panels and audio alerters have their own separate batteries, which must be installed at installation...

Sometimes the aircraft kits we build can use a little extra help when it comes to the final fit and finish. As builders, we...

The usual setup for my lathe is to have the compound slide set to 45 degrees and the tool post square to the spindle axis. While this setup is good for about 50 percent of the work I do—OD turning, facing, parting, grooving, boring, and 45-degree chamfering—it also means that for the other 50 percent, […]

Wherever a bolt is subject to rotation, it is required to have a castellated nut and cotter key. A typical mistake I see on...

With the recent rush to ADS-B, there has been a significant interest in GPS installations and even more interest in the antenna for those GPS installations. The interest runs the gamut from the eBay $1.99 specials to the gold-plated TSO-STC-PMA antennas, some of which are in the popular aviation catalogs ticking the $1,000 mark. The […]

A little over five years ago I wrote a maintenance article dealing with troubleshooting starter problems. The gist of the article was don’t assume poor...

My local airport, Corona Municipal in Southern California, sits in the Prodo Dam basin and is known to flood on occasion. Last February, heavy...

Talking on the communication radio in your homebuilt aircraft requires a simple push-to-talk (PTT) switch—an electrical push-button switch of the momentary-contact type. This switch...

In 1850, British physicist Joseph Swan began experimenting with paper coated with carbon in a glass tube that was partially evacuated from air. His paper glowed rather dimly, and the poor vacuum pumps of the day let enough oxygen into the glass tube to set the paper on fire when the electrified carbon got hot […]