·:[ Darryl's Coot Building Journal ]:·
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I upgraded the blogging software today. Leave a comment or send email if you notice anything wrong.

Russ Milham pointed out to the Coot Builder’s Group this video of an RC Coot being flown in a village in China:

[1.5 hours] Cut and glued blocking (315-3) for station 7. This is part of the nosewheel box.

[4 hours] As part of the loot that Russ Milham and I collected from Fran Neeley, I ended up with this engine cooling fan (drawing 807).

The only problem is that the fan is for a six-bolt prop. My Franklin 165 has an eight-bolt pattern. I’ve been wanting to do something in metal lately, so I built a new 807-1 plate for my engine. I built the -1 plate from 0.10″ 6061 (0.080″ is called for, but the old one was about 0.120″). The circle was cut out roughly and then trued on a lathe. The eight prop bolt holes were reamed for AN-6 prop bolts, but I am not sure if larger holes will be required for the final assembly (leave a comment if you know for sure).

Here is the assembled fan. I still have some finishing work (buffing out scratches, and priming) to do, I will replace the nuts and bolts, and I have a unused set of fan blades that I will probably install at some point. But it sure felt good to reassemble the cooling fan!

[0.5 hours] Cut out the first two internal battens for the nose box. Here is a photo of the old and “in progress” nose boxes. The bulkheads are not glued to the battens—just placed. Notice the two uprights at station 14 sans the rest of the bulkhead (they were not placed accurately).

See how ratty the old nose box is? That is from sitting outside for years and becoming a mouse nest/toilet. (Click on photo for a larger image.)

Remarkable as this might seem, the server that this blog resides on is physically located in downtown New Orleans. The folks at Zipa.com have done a remarkable job of keeping their server farm operating through the disaster happening there.

Much to my surprise, I have only noticed one brief loss of connectivity for about 4 hours on Tuedsay evening from about 4 pm to 8 pm.

If you are interested in an insiders view of the disaster, I recommend you read the Survival of New Orleans blog from the guy in charge of security and disaster management at Zipa.com (and DirectNIC.com). Or, wait a year for the movie. Seriously, this blog is worth reading from the beginning.

In any case, I finally got my first email from Zipa.com. Apparently they are now relocating their server room and it will entail some down time:

As most of you know, Zipa.com is located in downtown New Orleans which was effectively “ground zero” for Hurricane Katrina. Over the past five days, our staff has been hard at work around the clock keeping Zipa’s servers and services online. We are very proud of the fact that our own datacenter and the services it provides never went offline during this period.

Unfortunately, about 11 am CST (GMT -6) today, Zipa suffered the loss of several key Internet connections provided by companies outside of our network. This has caused the temporary loss of connectivity to sites which are using our hosting services and the need to move your shared hosting services in the near future.

We have been working with those companies to re-establish connectivity and for the most part have met with success.

At this time, we will start a migration to another data center, since we are unsure about the ability to continue service. This may cause some site down time as the IP addresses are updated. Any custom site modification might be lost. Please contact us if you run into problems.

We do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this situation is causing. Please understand that while we do not expect this situation to continue for long, we cannot provide details of exactly how long this restoration will take. Rest assured that we are doing absolutely everything humanly possible to get things fixed as quickly as possible. We humbly ask for your patience and continued support as we work to get everything back online.

So, don’t be surprised if this blog goes down for awhile.

Update: In fact, the blog did go down for much of today. When it came back up, the last several days of stuff was gone. I managed to recapture everything using the cache in my web browser. I didn’t bother updating the times, so the times are screwed up for the last several days. Big deal.