I've seen sitting here thinking for a minute, and this piece of brilliance hit me. When flying airplanes, one should always stack the odds in your favor. Whether crankshafts or gascolators, points of failure should be minimized, although not at "all costs", or at the risk of introducing other failure points.
There's my hard-earned wisdom for the day. Not an original thought, I realize, but worth considering again! I'll have to admit that I haven't always acted this way, but I'd like to think I'm getting smarter through experience. Maybe it's the clarity of having torn up a plane doing something you knew had a good chance of happening some day, and resolving to do better in the future. That's why I have one of Dan Weseman's 4340 crankshafts on my work bench. Having said that, there's something to be said for "if it works, don't fix it", because fixing it may introduce other problems. Maybe this is why I spend as much time looking and thinking at this plane and its systems as actually doing anything with it... Mark Langford ML at N56ML.com website at http://www.N56ML.com --------------------------------------------------------
