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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Four – The Model As Teaching Aid

As a kid interested in mechanical devices and particularly in aircraft and cars, there were a number of remarkably stupid ideas in my mind at the time. I would look at some fabulous machine and admire the external styling without the slightest notion of what might be going on inside. That’s pretty standard for a…
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Piasecki HUP Retriever – Part Three – The Temperature Gradient

Or ” How to build scale models without dying in the process “. The interior of the Little Workshop was over 42º Celsius one afternoon. No surprise – it was predicted to be a hot, still Sunday and the prediction was accurate. Also no surprise – this was Western Australia in the summertime. We saw…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part Two – Army Mule = Navy Retriever.

The Piasecki H25 Army Mule helicopter was not a very big lifter – even for a twin-rotor aircraft. None of the helicopters of the 50’s period were – they were limited by what their aero engines could do. The H 25 has a twin-row radial engine buried in the fuselage, but it is a small…
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Piasecki Army Mule – Part One – Buy Me, Boss…

Trolling the aisles of Hobbytech recently I was feeling discouraged – they’d had a big Christmas and sold off a lot of goods – but there weren’t many small kits left that fit my criteria; cheap, simple, and a western prototype in the propeller or early jet eras. I wasn’t able to spend big on…
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Hobby Money – Part Four – Pea Soup

Paying out for the goods, services, and experiences of a hobby is a natural process. You plays your money and you takes your pleasure. If your pleasure slackens or ceases you stops paying and goes onto something else. As long as you does not leave a string of corpses in the street, no-one is unhappy.…
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Hobby Money – Part Three – Finding Your Equivalencies

There’s all sorts of equivalencies that steer us around our lives. How many hours should you work to pay someone for working those same hours doing something you cannot do? How many if it is something you will not do. If you have good fortune, is it subtracted from their lives, or vice versa? Deep…
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Hobby Money – Part Two – When They See You Coming…

I understand certain things about economics. Such as, everything costs something; time, money, trouble, blood, ec. In the case of items sold by shops the situation of the shop can noticeably influence the prices charged. Knowing this all along doesn’t mean that seeing it in operation is rendered any less distressing when your pocket is…
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Hobby Money – Part One – The Price Of The Hobby Versus…

Versus the value of the hobby – an eternal debate in many fields. Whenever we engage in an activity that does not immediately yield food, shelter, or sex, there has to be some calculation as to the worth of the time and money spent. In most cases the good stuff takes a considerable amount of…
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Donny’s House

When I went to play at Donny’s house I made sure that I went to the bathroom at home first. Even if I didn’t have to go just then. It wasn’t a problem with dirty toilets – not that at all. That was a school problem, but as long as you didn’t need to do…
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Andrichuk’s House

Al’s retired and Vera knows it – because he is hanging around the house all day. Not that he does much to make it look better – he’s content that it had a coat of paint on the trim when he built it and doesn’t see where he needs to go mad with a paintbrush…
