The Airplane Saga, Part 4: Darn You, Sir Isaac Newton

I sat straddling the wooden glider that I'd built and gazed out at the horizon.  Behind me sat Chip.  Behind him sat Sean.  The horizon was a little lower than usual, maybe because in the past few months I'd grown a little taller.  Maybe it was because our would-be glider sat perched on the roof of the shed behind my house with a fuel tank full of ignorance and enough enthusiastic cargo to un-bummer North Korea.  

Around my neck hung a disposable camera on a piece of baling twine.  Sean sported a backpack full of sandwiches and a pair of binoculars.  Chip was wedged in between us like a wad of deli meat.  It was time to fly.  I had a sudden thought, and swiveled around to look at Chip.

"How will we steer?"  I asked.  Chip scrunched his face up one side at a time so that his cheeks would push his glasses further up on his nose.  I'd always admired his ability to do that.
"Lean"  he said.
"Oh yeah" I said.

Sean had weaseled his way onto the maiden voyage.  I'll never know why.  We couldn't argue with his logic that there was room for him in the back, and we were happy to have him along anyway to bear witness to our triumph.  Also we needed his help getting the thing onto the roof.  It had been no small task.

We had manhandled the heavy, awkward pile of lumber around to the back side of the shed, through the burdock bushes and onto the roof with remarkable force of will.  Negotiating the burdock bushes was the worst bit.

A burdock plant, for those who have not had the pleasure, has large broad leaves which are very cool and are good for any number of things.  Nestled inside the shadow of those leaves are the burdocks themselves:  Little marble-sized seed pods completely covered in tiny hooks.  They're like little Velcro balls.  Here's a picture I found online just now:

 

http://changingaging.org/blog/how-foraging-can-help-prepare-for-life-after-adulthood/burdock-burrs/
^^^Hey, that's the first time I've ever given credit for a picture I gribbled from another website! ^^^

It is physically impossible to walk anywhere near a burdock plant without later finding at least one of the sneaky bastards clinging to your clothes, shoelaces, or even directly to your skin.  Burdocks absolutely suck.  Testify. 

We managed to wrangle the aircraft onto the roof, and then managed to drag it all the way up the steep sheets of tin.  There, it rested comfortably between the ripples, denied the pull of gravity by three small pairs of double-knotted sneakers.  It was time to fly.   

With joy in our hearts and sausage gravy for brains, we started the countdown.  At "one", six sneakers lifted from the tin, and gravity took over with a vengeance.  We were fearless.  We knew as soon as we got up to speed we'd break free of the Earth in a volley of cheers, and we'd be wiping cloud-mist from our glasses alongside the eagles.

That's not what happened.  Seeds of doubt began to burrow into our collective psyche just as the nose of the craft ran out of tin.  But there was no time to bail out.

The seven-foot plummet into the burdock bushes was at once instantaneous and infinite.  Somewhere in that paradoxical pocket of space-time we became separated from the craft in a flying pile of elbows and binoculars.  The aircraft landed with a combination sound of thump and splinter.  We landed among it and ourselves like so much thrown spaghetti. 

We thrashed around in the pucker-brush for quite a while.  When we emerged, many things had changed.  Sean had an entire burdock-afro.  He had launched with a bowl-cut and emerged from the crash site looking like Richard Simmons.  Baseball-sized wads of burdocks clumped under my armpits until I couldn't put my hands on my sides, and thousands more clung tightly to every square inch of our clothes.  Chips shoes were nowhere to be seen.

Somehow, miraculously, perhaps thanks to youthful flexibility or perhaps because fate wasn't paying attention at just that moment, none of us was the least bit hurt.  The pile of boards that lay inches from our fragile selves, with nails protruding from every angle, had not injured us in the least.  Gravity had failed to destroy us.  My mother, on the other hand, no doubt would.

Previous: Part III
Next: Part V

The Airplane Saga, Part 3: Lawn-gistics

"Hey Chip" I said, just about every day "didja get the engine yet?"
"Not yet" Chip would say.  "Soon."  One day I asked him and he said "Yep."  It was the greatest day ever.

I made the necessary arrangements to go to his house to pick it up.  Mainly that entailed donning a backpack and getting on my bike.  Chips house was only a handful of miles from mine from a satellite perspective, but from behind the handlebars it was significantly longer.  I had to take the dreaded "Wilson road" which was basically impassable for any vehicle not equipped with chains, and the result of every bike trip down it resulted in the tell-tale streak of mud, spattered in a speckly line up the back of whatever I happened to be wearing.

On the day the engine was ready, most of the mud hit the backpack.  The rest of it hit the back of my head.  I knew enough not to smear it around when it was still wet, it was easier just to just let it dry and then shake it out.  To the untrained eye, however, I was a kid with a muddy head who didn't seem to mind it.  Chip's brother Sean thought it was hilarious, but his mom wouldn't let me in the house that day. 

I didn't blame her.  I'm surprised she ever let me in the house at all, given my nearly perfect record of managing to wreak some sort of havoc every time I visited.  I was a force of nature. Somehow I would end up in the brook and came back in the house completely soaked, or I'd get covered in pine-pitch, or I'd crash the dirt bike.  Once, while being towed behind the snow-mobile on an inner tube by Chip, I'd been rocketed into a patch of trees and wound up with very little skin remaining on my left side.  Another time, while flailing around in the throes of story-telling, I knocked a lit candle off the shelf and blasted hot wax all over her freshly-swept kitchen floor.  Still, she kept letting me in the house.  Michele, if you're reading this, thanks for that!  You sure put up with a lot out of me over the years.

"Where's the engine?" I asked.
"We gotta get it out."  Chip said.
"Out of where?"
"The lawnmower."

This sent up a few red flags, even for me, but that wasn't enough to stop us.  The lawnmower was out in the shed, where lawnmowers belong.  We set upon it with wrenches and hammers, but our operation was shut down prematurely by Chip's dad, who wasn't the least bit amused by the fact that we were attempting to unceremoniously gut his perfectly good lawnmower.  We hadn't made much progress; it is remarkably difficult to remove a lawnmower engine without the appropriate tools.  That's probably why we were allowed to continue being alive.

It was a major setback; our aircraft would remain grounded until we could come up with a new means of propulsion.  Our brains, powered as they were by youthful enthusiasm, churned out idea after bad idea.  Finally we settled on the most obvious solution:  The craft was now a glider!  Given the right wind conditions, we could sail around like autumn leaves on a gentle breeze.   

All we had to do was launch it off the roof.

Previous: Part II
Next: Part IV

The Airplane Saga, Part 2: Some Assembly Required

Chip was not immediately forthcoming with the lawnmower engine, but as I understood that such delicate equipment surgeries must not be rushed, I pressed on with my construction of the aircraft without hesitation or doubt.  As it happens, an airplane isn't as difficult to build as one might imagine.

I kept it simple.  The fuselage came together quite nicely, and in about half an hour.  It consisted of four long 1x10s, nailed together into a long hollow box.  I cut pieces to fit into the holes in the front and the back, and drilled a hole in the front piece so the drive shaft from the lawnmower engine could fit through.  That's where I would attach the propeller.

Across the top, near the middle, I nailed another 1x10 which became the wings.  My fixed-wing aircraft was nearly complete.  Last, I nailed a smaller board across the back end, and stepped back.  I pushed my giant, plastic, tape-wadded glasses higher up on my nose, brushed the sawdust out of my bowl-cut and stood proudly surveying my handiwork.

It looked vaguely like an airplane, and I was overjoyed with how well it had turned out.  Here's an artists conception, and by that I mean here's a picture I just made in MS Paint.

Having done it once and since hindsight is 20/20, I feel I can safely point out a few mistakes which, should I build it again, I might consider re-thinking.  I made no measurements whatsoever.  In almost contemptuous disregard for Boyle's law, I didn't even bother to bevel the edges of the wing.  I didn't take into account that the craft would need a fuel tank of some sort, and I didn't leave enough room for the lawnmower engine.  I didn't add a rear vertical stabilizer, or rudder of any kind.  Also it had no landing gear, and no seats.  That's about it for mistakes, actually.

Not too bad. 

The propeller was a little more challenging.  I shaped it easily enough, but the hole in the middle was round and kept slipping on the test drive-shaft I'd whipped up.  A round peg in a round hole.  I whittled several iterations, tried wedging in bits of tree bark, bike tire rubber, wood shavings and everything else I could find  before my dad came to my rescue and suggested I file a square hole and a square peg.  That solved everything.  My finished propeller was about eight inches across.  Plenty. 

So far Chips contributions had been fairly minimal, but I was convinced that in a day or two we'd be doing loops and barrel rolls around the property.  My folks asked me to take a camera up with me to get some pictures of the house, and I happily agreed.  They had no idea the depth of my conviction to actually follow through on the project and make the thing fly.  


Previous:  Part I
Next:  Part III

The Airplane Saga, Part 1: One Head is Better Than Two

Somewhere during second grade I got a new kid in my class.  He told us his name was Gary, but that his family called him Chip; not because he looked like a chipmunk, but because he was a "chip off the ol' block."  I still don't believe him about that, but either way I can't remember ever calling him Gary.  To me he's been Chip the whole time.

I've never had to be the new kid in class but I imagine it's pretty traumatic.  I remember the teacher, Mrs. Belding, bringing him up in front of the class like you see in movies and introducing him while he stood there looking terrified and uncomfortable in his red wind-breaker.  On the playground later that day I kicked a soccer ball around with him for a few minutes, learned that he had enough nine volt batteries in his possession to build a life-sized replica of the Kremlin, and that was all she wrote.   

We shared a passion for building things and enjoyed many brain-storming sessions where we tossed around our potentially world-altering ideas for new inventions.  Maybe brain-storm isn't the right term.  It was more like a brain-shower, or a brain-drizzle.  Who am I kidding, it was a brain-barely-perceptible-spritz.

After one such session, in flurry of sketches, schematics, and crumpled up notebook paper complete with edge frizz, one of us hatched a terrible idea.  Unfortunately we both latched onto it like two brain-damaged snapping turtles.  It soon became the sole focus of our collective existence.

We would build an airplane.  Oh yes.  

It made sense.  We both wanted to fly, and since no amount of jumping from the tops of fence poles armed with garbage-bag parachutes had done the trick so far, what better way than to build our very own flying machine, and conquer the skies once and for all?

All the pieces fell into place.  I prided myself on my ability to whittle, so the propeller became my responsibility. It would turn under motor power, and Chip claimed to have just the lawnmower engine for the job.  Both of us had immediate access to hundreds of acres of Vermont forests where we could gather raw materials.  The plan couldn't have been more perfect.  All that remained was to build it.  


Next:  Part II

Another Dead Language In Our Midst?

I was writing an essay tonight and thinking about how tricky it is to get my words to have the right "voice".  It occurs to me that as advanced as our written language may be, it is still sadly lacking in what a musician would refer to as "timbre".  There's no way to tell what the writers voice would actually sound like if you could hear them speaking.  Was he or she a smoker?  Nasal?  Loud, quiet, obnoxious?

In music, timbre is expressed through the use of various instruments.  There are only so many voices, as limited by the instruments.  A note played by a trombone sounds different than the same note played by a flute.  How does a writer convey the sound of their voice?

"Bollocks!" he said, in his raspy, yet oddly soothing and somehow nasal voice.  What does that sound like?  It's up to the reader to plug in those variables and make a voice for the speaker.  I imagine it's just as hard, if not harder for a musician.  

How hard is it for a musician to translate their music into a readable medium?  The great composers of the past; Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc, etc, etc.. were all forced to "speak" the same written language.  Musical notation is mankind's best effort when it comes to writing down what music is supposed to sound like.  It's brilliant, and detailed, and complicated, but is it good enough?  Look at this:

It takes a trained musician to be able to even begin to decipher this in order to duplicate what the composer was trying to say.  Yet every orchestra will play it a little bit differently, because there is a level of interpretation required.  

I submit that things have changed.  Whereas once a musician had to annotate everything precisely and had to use every trick available in the language of written music in order to convey what he or she was trying to convey, today all a musician needs to do is have any number of easily accessible forms of mufti-media.

Anyone can listen to a recording of anyone else and know exactly what that artist intended the music to sound like.  Is the language of written music a dying language?  I wonder.

After a massive electromagnetic pulse, will there be enough of our music recorded in hard copy for someone to be able to accurately reproduce it in 500 years?  Or are we depending on digital recordings of everything to survive the ages?

I wonder.