New study on lead fragments from shot in game birds

[ch]

Yeah that lead tinsel made the best balls to through at my sister. Oh what about all that mecury in my mouth. ummmm. ch I think maybe thats to keep the motor warm?

[Richard Flanders]

James: It's an insulated engine cover that keeps the engine warm so you can start it again. If you let it get too cold while you're out playing, it's hard on the engine to restart it as it has a splash oil system for lubricating the cam lobes. I generally preheat the engine with a small electric heater inside the covered cowling overnight if it's real cold. The cover used to be black but UV fixed that.

Depth perception while landing on skis depends upon the lighting. On cloudy days the light is flat on snow and perception is bad so we sometimes make a low and slow pass on a landing site and toss out a string of spruce boughs... or sleeping bags, water bottles, parkas, or whatever is in the plane so we have some reference. On nice sunny days ski landings are the easiest of all and resemble a flat water landing on floats; you just fly it into the snow at a slow descent rate until it is on the ground...

[Autumn Daze]

Rich,Very ingenious! Thanks for explaining that....

[Blind Dog]

I have heard that the cold weather bushies would drain the hot oil in couple of jugs for an overnighter and take them to bed with them. Probably no squaws available.

[Richard Flanders]

When I'm going to be out in some really remote location where it's not below about -10F and will need to preheat somehow I drain my engine oil into two 1-gal Coleman fuel cans and store them inside the cabin or wall tent. On departure day I crack the can lids a touch and put them on the wood stove until I can just barely keep my hands on the cans, which would be about 200deg, then run out dump it in quickly, hand prop it over 50times with the mixture pulled, then give it gas and hand prop it to start it. This is the "old" way of doing it and is still the very best. I am the only pilot that I know of that still uses this tried and true method. At least you get the cam and crankshaft journals and the wrist pins lubed before startup. If it's below -10deg I drain the oil and use a Red Dragon propane-fired heater to preheat the whole engine. This is essential when it's -30 or -40 for sure. Below -40 and it has to be pretty essential for me to be somewhere for me to even think of starting the plane. Going to look for an overdue pilot friend in the middle of the night in mid winter comes to mind for one time I did it. He was stuck on a glacier at 7000'. They couldn't take off due to deep snow and spent so much time packing a strip with skis that his engine was way too cold to start. We found him and radioed in to the rescue coord center that he was ok and I flew in a Red Dragon the following day and we got him going. Others use everything from MSR or single-burner coleman stoves to catalytic heaters for preheating. Extreme cold weather flying is a real project.

[james van blaricum]

Thanks Richard, That is quite a procedure,inKansas it never gets that cold and I don't think I could prop a skylane anyway. jvb

[ch]

30 or 40 below thats scary cold, make a memory out of a person pretty fast.

[Richard Flanders]

You can prop a skylane but it's scary. Lots of horsepower there. I had to hand prop a C-180 when the owner and I got stuck on a remote glacier below Mt McKinley in very bad weather and were overdue on our flight plan. The alert was out and we killed the battery listening to prognostications as to our doom on the radio chatter between airliners above but no one could hear us. When the weather cleared enough for us to fly after 2 days there the battery was kaput so I propped it to life. One mis-step on the snow and you'd look like a badly processed swiss steak or a gory victim on CSI Miami for sure.... who got me started on these flying stories???

[ch]

Don't matter they are good to read. Weather put you on the glacier. Oh, that must of been before all the glaciers melted because of global warming(-: ch

[Bruce Day]

Richard, flying C-130's above the Arctic Circle and way down in temps, we would always park near a hanger, so we could get an electrical power cart started and from that get the aircraft APU started. We could get a heater cart started in the hanger, get hot air to an engine, let it warm up for a while, then run the air from the APU through the bleed air system to start #1. From that, we could spin the others and get them to start, but you didn't want to move the prop controls until they warmed up for 10min otherwise your props could leak.

Brings back memories of Reyjavik, Iceland, Goose Bay, Aleutians, Fairbanks ( near you), and those were heavily populated areas compared to what you do. We could always go back inside and get a cup of coffee.