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Sagebrush posted:I noticed something odd about the Alfa Romeo parked around the corner. Not to disagree but the 4c is a $60k car at best.
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Dec 31, 2021 16:04
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Sagebrush posted:The opposite tire was nearly bald and had several tears forming in the sidewall. I love seeing morons trying to be penny-wise with their $300,000 supercars You're thinking of the 8C Competizione, which was a limited production $300,000 concept car come to life that raided the Ferrari and Maserati parts bins instead. e:f;b
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Dec 31, 2021 16:21
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You know what they say about Alfas, "be able to buy 5 to afford 1"
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Dec 31, 2021 16:49
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Sagebrush posted:I noticed something odd about the Alfa Romeo parked around the corner. Happens all the time with aspirational people who have juuuuust enough $$ to buy the car, but never think about maintenance costs. See: used Mercedes Benzes, et al.
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Dec 31, 2021 17:52
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Salami Surgeon posted:You know what they say about Alfas, "be able to buy 5 to afford 1" I thought it was “buy three so one is running when you want to drive it?”
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Dec 31, 2021 18:06
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That's so true. A 10-15 year old will be much cheaper to buy, but the maintenance costs are basically the same as a new Porsche but without the warranty. General rule of thumb I've always used when giving advice to the "younger" generation when asked- if you are thinking of buying a car think you can just make it work financially, it is very likely that you cannot afford the vehicle.
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Dec 31, 2021 18:08
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From what I’ve read around, the parts bin components of a 4c are decently reliable while the custom cf parts tend to rot/break easily. Even if they didn’t sold that well, you don’t see them anymore in the streets of 
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Dec 31, 2021 18:14
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They were pretty common around south Florida when they were new, but I haven’t seen one in awhile. because they’re all broken in a garage Holy poo poo I just looked up US sales numbers. No wonder I don’t see them anymore. 2014 - 67 2015 - 663 2016 - 492 2017 - 406 2018 - 238 2019 - 145 2020 - 99 2021 - 78
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Dec 31, 2021 18:23
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MrYenko posted:I thought it was “buy three so one is running when you want to drive it?” Two parts cars ain't gonna cut it
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Dec 31, 2021 18:27
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MrYenko posted:Let me tell you a story. an only slightly related but still good vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k1TQGK3mZI
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Jan 4, 2022 10:50
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Jonny Nox posted:an only slightly related but still good vid: Its really weird that any company would want to DISTANCE themselves from Mercedes Benz when using their engines, since Mercedes diesels are basically the kings of longevity.
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Jan 4, 2022 14:54
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CommieGIR posted:Its really weird that any company would want to DISTANCE themselves from Mercedes Benz when using their engines, since Mercedes diesels are basically the kings of longevity. Watching through it, it feels more like the aviation community is packed with the same old guys who would rather go with the devil they knew than the devil they don't, combined with companies not understanding how the FAA wants a tear-down to proceed. Something tells me that with the eroding middle class and one of those dual-engine diesel planes starting at a cool million freakin dollars, the only people operating these things will be flight schools full of said old guys. The general aviation industry seems (to me) like what would happen if every single new car sold in America was sold to the same grandpa or uncle that thinks that motors peaked with the 350 SBC running a 4-barrel, and the EPA didn't give two shits either way.
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Jan 4, 2022 17:49
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Pretty much. That and if GM was building all the airplanes but learned the wrong lesson from the ht4100 debacle: never build anything new ever, keep building those carbed 350s I actually got blocked by a former friend on Facebook recently because I dared to imply that maybe his anger was misplaced against a Californian town for stopping selling 100ll at their airport was overdue rather than being a horrible communist thing to do, because maybe the aviation industry has had half a loving CENTURY to make bare minimum incremental changes to their engines to allow them to run on 91 octane mogas and the writing has been on the wall the entire time but no one listened. This isn't hard, we've been working car engines harder (at peak anyways) for many times longer TBO with shittier plugs this entire time. Aviation should have started prepping for joining the modern 1985 world of unleaded gas in 1975, not... Oh wait it still hasn't.
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Jan 4, 2022 18:06
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How dare you point out someone is wrong using a facts and logic!
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Jan 4, 2022 18:09
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Now that Swift fuels has gotten their UL94 blend approved, there's even less of an excuse to still be using leaded gas, because something like half the general aviation aircraft in the United States can swap over to UL94 with no modifications and a $100 permanent STC. My flight school / club switched over about 6 months ago in everything without a turbocharger, and so far there have been zero issues. The only annoying thing is that UL94 is not dyed, so you really gotta look closely for water contamination. Oh well
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Jan 4, 2022 19:02
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kastein posted:Pretty much. That and if GM was building all the airplanes but learned the wrong lesson from the ht4100 debacle: never build anything new ever, keep building those carbed 350s Ugh, I continuously forget aviation fuel is often still leaded.
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Jan 4, 2022 20:04
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CommieGIR posted:Ugh, I continuously forget aviation fuel is often still leaded. Another feature of the fuel.
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Jan 4, 2022 20:08
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It's been a long-rear end time since I've been to aviation school (I'm a dropout for various reasons) but I remember that a ton of the people making decisions there were old. Doesn't really surprise me that old men are resistant to any sort of change and look at anything new as a problem. kastein posted:Pretty much. That and if GM was building all the airplanes but learned the wrong lesson from the ht4100 debacle: never build anything new ever, keep building those carbed 350s Honestly, if the EPA and CARB hadn't effectively legislated the carburetor to death, America would still be rolling around with 250HP 4-barrel gassers that get single-digit fuel economy in trucks (and we'd be paying $50k for them to boot).
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Jan 4, 2022 21:06
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There's also the part where airplanes last way longer than cars, so even if you put strict regulations on aircraft engines starting tomorrow, it would take ages to make inroads.
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Jan 5, 2022 12:18
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funeral home DJ posted:Watching through it, it feels more like the aviation community is packed with the same old guys who would rather go with the devil they knew than the devil they don't, combined with companies not understanding how the FAA wants a tear-down to proceed. Something tells me that with the eroding middle class and one of those dual-engine diesel planes starting at a cool million freakin dollars, the only people operating these things will be flight schools full of said old guys. I think you guys are reading between the lines when you should be paying attention to the surface message of the video. The biggest barrier to auto engine conversions is just the cost of doing all the engineering, testing, certification, and setting up good field support operations (legally operated non-experimental GA aircraft have highly regulated maintenance). As for going with the devil you know... well, the costs of failure when innovating in airplanes include tombstones. Did you notice that the video mentioned the first attempt to convert that Merc diesel ended in tears, partially due to in-flight failures? Yes, people do get conservative when it's their life on the line. But ultimately it always comes back to money. High quality high tech engineering is always made easier by how many units you get to sell (since you get to amortize the cost across every unit), and that economy of scale just isn't there for GA. Lycomings and Continentals may be shockingly expensive to buy and maintain by auto engine standards, but a clean sheet fully certified high tech replacement would be much more.
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Jan 5, 2022 12:33
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Computer viking posted:There's also the part where airplanes last way longer than cars, so even if you put strict regulations on aircraft engines starting tomorrow, it would take ages to make inroads. And if they'd done it 40 years ago, we'd be seeing plenty of unleaded aircraft engines.
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Jan 5, 2022 22:13
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Not really. The Golden Age of general aviation was in the 70s. The bottom fell out in the 80s, and of the big three airplane manufacturers, one stopped making consumer aircraft completely for a period and the other two have gone through bankruptcies in one form or another. The aircraft industry is a shell of it's former self, and new plane sales are a fraction of what they were. So even if planes 40 years ago started being built to use unleaded, a large portion of planes would still require 100LL.
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Jan 6, 2022 02:46
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There's also the fact that something like 30% of the piston engine GA fleet uses about 80% of the total avgas, and since those airplanes run turbocharged engines that absolutely require the higher octane rating, it's historically been easier to just grandfather 100LL in whenever environmental/emissions standards change than to put all the time and money into finding a universal replacement for lead. On the subject of mechanical failures and airplanes, I'd like to mention the Porsche PFM 3200. The PFM 3200 was Porsche attempting to re-enter the aviation engine market in the 1980's with an engine derived from the one used in the 911, and despite the company throwing a reported $75 million into the program, they only ever built about 80 engines, 41 of which were used on Mooney M20L's built in 1988. Porsche surrendered the type certificate for the engines in 2007 and stopped providing any support at the time, and while the FAA has said airplanes using the engines are still airworthy if maintained as required, the complete lack of factory support or any kind of stock of parts makes that part tricky. azflyboy fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 03:22
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Salami Surgeon posted:Not really. The Golden Age of general aviation was in the 70s. The bottom fell out in the 80s, and of the big three airplane manufacturers, one stopped making consumer aircraft completely for a period and the other two have gone through bankruptcies in one form or another. The aircraft industry is a shell of it's former self, and new plane sales are a fraction of what they were. So even if planes 40 years ago started being built to use unleaded, a large portion of planes would still require 100LL. Yeah, but the TBOs on aircraft engines are in the 4 figure hour range, not "you overhaul it when it ends up on a tow truck", so there are ample opportunities in between the 70s and now for each aircraft to have had upgraded parts put in that wouldn't need 100LL.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:28
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Computer viking posted:There's also the part where airplanes last way longer than cars, so even if you put strict regulations on aircraft engines starting tomorrow, it would take ages to make inroads. Not really, they've already made regulation changes that required modification or retirement of engines already in service. Noise abatement, for example.
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Jan 6, 2022 03:46
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kastein posted:Yeah, but the TBOs on aircraft engines are in the 4 figure hour range, not "you overhaul it when it ends up on a tow truck", so there are ample opportunities in between the 70s and now for each aircraft to have had upgraded parts put in that wouldn't need 100LL. Depending on how well the airplane is maintained, a 2000hr TBO can easily cover an airplane for 20 years or more, and since private owners aren't required to follow TBO schedules, it can take decades for something to trickle down to most of the GA fleet if the FAA doesn't force an "immediate" change. With ethanol, the issue is with seals and lines in the fuel system (which typically aren't replaced until they fail or show signs of wear), as well as the fact that a lot of airplanes spend a lot of time sitting, so ethanol degrading some kinds of rubber and turning into varnish means that airplanes were always going to need some other kind of additive. Plus, avgas sales are miniscule in comparison to gasoline or diesel (about 200 million gallons of avgas are sold per year, versus 120some billion gallons of auto gas), so the economic incentive to come up with something different than lead wasn't really there either.
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Jan 6, 2022 04:04
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kastein posted:Yeah, but the TBOs on aircraft engines are in the 4 figure hour range, not "you overhaul it when it ends up on a tow truck", so there are ample opportunities in between the 70s and now for each aircraft to have had upgraded parts put in that wouldn't need 100LL. What other posters said - if you fly an hour a week every week for the life of an engine, you’re putting it in service for 30 years, assuming a 1500hr tbo and no unexpected/maintenance induced failures. And that’s assuming you commit to overhauling it at TBO, which isn’t required for the average hobby airplane enthusiast. As a result it’s not uncommon to find airplanes still flying with engines that haven’t been overhauled since the 60s (if you’re into vintage airplanes). The real issue with the reid-hillview situation is that leaded gas is being used as the scapegoat that will eventually shut the airport down so it can be turned into more luxury housing for rich tech weenies in the Silicon Valley. The city doesn’t give two shits about the airport and would rather have the tax revenue all that new housing would bring in.
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Jan 9, 2022 07:56
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Jonny Nox posted:an only slightly related but still good vid: Never don’t watch Paul Bertorelli videos. He’s the guy I want to be when I grow up.  azflyboy posted:On the subject of mechanical failures and airplanes, I'd like to mention the Porsche PFM 3200. Ahhhh the Porsche Mooney. The PFM 3200 was the first FADEC GA engine ever certified in the US, and is widely regarded as an engineering triumph for its time. It had a few minor issues that never got corrected due to lack of investment, but they were absolutely correctable if Porsche had seen a return on their investment. However, it was a sales flop. A catastrophic flop. Over 6 years of production, Porsche built only 80 engines, and Mooney delivered only 41 airplanes. (The engine was used as one-offs in several other airframes.) See, this was the late eighties. The meat of the GA market were WWII vets who were just beginning to age out of aviation/retire, and the myriad military pilots that resulted from the Cold War and Vietnam. There was still a thriving GA new-build market, and Mooney was simultaneously delivering hundreds of non-Porsche Mooneys. This is not a market that is going to take kindly to a new-fangled computer managing their engine. The PFM3200 was praised for easy starting (because it has actual electronic fuel injection instead of continuous-flow fuel injection) and smooth running (because Porsche realized that people buying a $personal airplane$ actually do care about NVH,) but widely panned for its single lever control. Yes, they were criticized for removing the mixture and prop controls. The entirety of aviation had learned to fly airplanes where everything is completely manual. Where setting power is a dance of checking the chart, reducing RPM, reducing manifold pressure, leaning the mixture, rechecking the manifold pressure, adjusting all of the above, and doing it all over very time you change altitude or power setting. NOT having to do that gave people fits. “What if it isn’t exactly the right mixture setting?” “What if I want to run over square, in case I have to go around?” “What if I want to run under square at cruise?” “What if I want to run lean of peak?” “What if I want to run rich of peak?” It was endless. It was pointless. You cannot talk sense to people like this. I’d put money on at least one of these Luddite fuckers being on Capitol Hill about a year ago. The fact that they didn’t have to worry about all this trivial nonsense and could just fly the godamned airplane for a change apparently never occurred to any of them. The aforementioned minor issues (valve-spring wear necessitated a 500hr valve-spring replacement interval, which is not great but also never caused an accident) caused some headaches for owners, who began making a ton of noise at Porsche. Porsche promised that a new valve spring package was in design, and would become available to remove the 500hr service interval. In the end, Porsche ended up punted on the changes, probably hoping the program would pick up some popularity and justify further investment. The owners sued. It was ugly. So the Porsche Mooney failed. They built 40 in 1988, and a single example in 1989. Porsche closed the engine line in 1991, and surrendered the engine type certificate to the FAA in 2007. No further support is a available. At one point Porsche did organize a partially-subsidized re-engining program with a shop in Punta Gorda, Florida. Using IO-550s, your Porsche Mooney would be converted to a much more mundane (and more powerful) Continental power plant, but at least you wouldn’t lose the use of your airplane. It was the last straw. In 2004, Hurricane Charley tore through the Florida Keys and southwest Florida, on its way up the middle of the state. The contractor’s hangar was destroyed. 22 Porsche Mooneys in various states of conversion were severely damaged or destroyed. All 39 employees at ModWorks not only lost their jobs, they had also all lost their homes in the storm. The conversion program was over. The owners continued to sue Porsche, and as late as 2011, a Florida court ruled that Porsche was still potentially liable for damages caused to plaintiffs by their failure to provide a conversion program, though the court simultaneously refused the plaintiffs claims for strict product liability, stating that at no point had anyone brought evidence of anyone sustaining personal injury due to a defective Porsche engine. TLDR; Boomers are the loving worst, and they not only sued Porsche out of the aviation industry, they stunted the growth of FADEC in GA. kastein posted:Yeah, but the TBOs on aircraft engines are in the 4 figure hour range, not "you overhaul it when it ends up on a tow truck", so there are ample opportunities in between the 70s and now for each aircraft to have had upgraded parts put in that wouldn't need 100LL. This is an example of the way certification works actively hindering aviation. Engines are type certified in a very similar way to airplanes themselves. The manufacturer shows the FAA that when an engine is built via this documented process, with these parts, to these standards, it produces this power at this fuel burn with these reliability numbers. The FAA certifies it, and now you can install it in your certified airplane. Except now you legally can’t change a single part. The valve seats have to be produced of the same material and with the same process as when the engine was certified in 1953. You can theoretically engineer an STC, but engine STCs (other than MOGAS or 94UL STCs for engines that were originally certified on 80/87 AVGAS anyway) are exceedingly rare, due to the costs associated with FAA approval. (An STC has a process tail very similar to certification, except localized to the parts that you’re modifying.) Certification is a good thing, and we shouldn’t get rid of entirely, but it’s LONG overdue for a complete process overhaul. Replacing completely manually-operated updraft-carbureted 7.5:1 lead-burning air cooled engines is well within our technical ability as a species, if only the FAA would admit that certification stopped being about safety fifty years ago, and started being about bureaucratic box-checking. The FAA punted once again on part 23 certification, and has essentially driven the piston single market underground, with almost all innovation and probably 90% of new airplanes now being “homebuilt” “experimentals.” It’s not a good system, and it’s yet another serious stain on the FAA’s credibility as a regulator that they can’t seem to see the issues with their overbearing process. loving hell. I need to stay out of this thread. 
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Jan 9, 2022 14:48
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Out of general curiosity - because this is not a field I'll ever touch - is this different in other regions? Is it easier to get something approved with the EASA, or does the French and German love for procedure and bureaucracy make up for the stodginess of the FAA?
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Jan 9, 2022 17:14
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Computer viking posted:Out of general curiosity - because this is not a field I'll ever touch - is this different in other regions? Is it easier to get something approved with the EASA, or does the French and German love for procedure and bureaucracy make up for the stodginess of the FAA? Heading dealt with French bureaucracy, I can only imagine how awful their version of the FAA would be.
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Jan 9, 2022 17:19
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I don’t know much about EASA certification, other than (prior to the 73M debacle) they essentially mirrored FAA certification. Europe has the additional problem of being pretty actively hostile to GA generally, compared to the US, so the market is EVEN SMALLER. It’s worth noting that the European Light Sport market is pretty much the largest growth segment in aviation right now, though.
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Jan 9, 2022 18:00
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 New runflat technology seen at the gas station.
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Jan 9, 2022 21:38
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Oh man, these tires feel like total garbage.
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Jan 9, 2022 21:42
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unbuttonedclone posted:
Sweet ride.
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Jan 9, 2022 21:42
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https://i.imgur.com/8DdD9iN.mp4
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Jan 9, 2022 21:49
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We all knew they were going to rip the rear axle off, but then we got a little treat.
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Jan 9, 2022 22:39
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Probably still runs
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Jan 9, 2022 22:47
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All that water weight in the front of the cabin well and truly destroyed the front unibody there. I'm sure Ivan had that fixed by the evening
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Jan 9, 2022 22:59
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And it will look like a Veyron
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Jan 10, 2022 00:37
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unbuttonedclone posted:
 
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