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CHIEF

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by CHIEF

  1. Yes. It was on the corner closest to Anderson Mill. CHIEF
  2. Hell, I think I've maybe even been their with Brisket and a mutual friend. I know we used to frequent the one at the corner in the strip mall on the SW corner of Anderson Mill and 183. It had that Aussie owner that ended up in some kind of trouble. CHIEF
  3. Many a time. Was the closest bar to my house in Cedar Park off of 620/Cypress Creek Rd. That was before we knew to yell "Muledick" when we walked in the door. CHIEF
  4. Especially hot Russian big titted women. No need for mail order, just hit them up on Tinder. I'm sure Austin, DFW, Houston, and San Antonio have a few refugees coming around. Probably some Ukrainian ones as well. CHIEF
  5. Haven't seen any kids wearing Buster Browns lately. CHIEF
  6. Falstaff is also no longer made. CHIEF
  7. Is it live? Or is it Memorex? Bought and dissolved by Tandy in 1988. CHIEF
  8. There is a Gibson's in Weatherford. Was the goto place for ammo a couple of years ago, until I found a guy on a county road a few miles from us that can get about anything, and is priced right. CHIEF
  9. I was the first to see him, he has been to some of the other hunter's feeders, but is on a "no kill" list. Since I was the first to see him, I get to be the one that shoots him. If someone is seeing him at their stand, I will hunt their stand to kill him. It's kinda set up that way through a mutual agreement. That way no one gets disappointed and no one else feels like a sheep killin' dog. Preserves friendships, which is what's most important. I get texts all day, CHIEF, your deer is at my feeder, I figured he ate $1.56 worth of corn, here is my Venmo info. All of these guys own their own business and are really successful, but act dirt poor. I picked up a carport from my wife's modular building company for $13.18 just to get it off their books. Told the group I expect their $1.32 when we get it here. One asked if he could pay it in installments. CHIEF
  10. Got back from the 8 day hunt in Benjamin. The rut is on, we saw a bunch of good bucks, all 10 hunters have, at least a 150" class deer coming to their area. The big ones won't go into the feeder pens unless the road corn gets eaten, and they absolutely have to. Here is our "Big Toad". We all looked at pictures and couldn't get him to 5.5 years, so he walks until next year: CHIEF
  11. Deuce against the vaunted KU run game defense doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies. CHIEF
  12. It's funny, all the guys I hunt with are from Temple/Killeen/Belton/Salado, they drive 5-5 1/2 hours each week to hunt in Benjamin. CHIEF
  13. Was gonna leave tonight but CHIEF Jr. is still in a class giving a presentation. Also, my late father's sister passed, and visitation is tonight. We are leaving in the morning for the lease, in Benjamin, won't be coming back till Monday the 28th. CHIEF
  14. Did the quake shake Midland pretty hard? CHIEF
  15. I've never felt an earthquake, or if I did I attributed it to something else. Why do y'all get to have all the fun? CHIEF
  16. I can't wait for this, work a few years to pay for a robot worker to replace you. Send it to work each morning, go back to bed, wake up and lay on the couch drinking beer and watching Andy Griffith reruns. CHIEF
  17. My thinking is that the Ukes make one more offensive to take the Highway at Melitopol, cut off the food and equipment supply to Crimea, cut off the water from Kherson, and sit back and wait. Let nature take its course. Russian citizens escape by walking across the Kerch Bridge, Russian soldiers will be shot trying to cross. No winter uniforms, nothing to eater drink, no more ammo or equipment. By February, Russian soldiers will be reduced to cannibalism and drinking each others blood. Ukraine walks into Crimea without firing a shot. CHIEF
  18. CHIEF
  19. Sorry to have struck a nerve. Didn't mean to come across that way. For four years I was with my boss at airshows in Abilene, Breckenridge, and Waco. I witnessed Don Knapp's fatal P-51D crash (faulty fuel gage) I have about 400 hours with about 60 or so in formation (following my boss from an airport where he had purchased a broke down piece of shit plane for peanuts). I have flown a Cherokee 140 with no interior while sitting on a five gallon bucket. I have flown a Bonanza (not even type rated) where we aired up the flat, weather cracked tires, and a windshield that had so many micro-fractures that I could nearly see him in front of me a thousand foot. He talked me into some stupid shit. His excuse? I have a family, and you need the seat time. Shit got real and extreme changes came after 9/11. I haven't piloted a private plane since. Clifton was close enough to Crawford (George Bush Jr. Ranch) that it wasn't worth getting escorted by F-16s to the nearest airport and footing the bill for the scramble. Our crop-duster's business was shut down, things just got crazy. CHIEF
  20. But how much of that 34,000 hours were in the P-63? I have that many hours in a pickup truck, but not a Shelby Cobra. It's the familiarity/proficiency. To join up with that B-17 he would have had to have known he was there, and be running about 100 mph slower. The Tora Tora Tora planes are T-6s, they maintain formation, and everyone steps back out of their way. T-6s are a dime a dozen, it is the F150 of airshows, a 230 mph plane. This was the only P-63F in existence. CHIEF
  21. After getting out of college, getting married, and raising a young family, I didn't keep up with it much, other than the occasional trip over to view the static display and the occasional takeoff and landing at the Burnet show. The CAF was kinda the first Collective warbird club. There were still a lot of WWII vets that were young enough and familiar enough to have turned wrenches on, or flown these aircraft in WWII. They were in their 70's, and still pretty spry. I think losing that generation, their knowledge, and the fact that when they were young, they did this for 24/7 for four years with a gun pointed at them has cost most of the loses. They were all trained by the US Government with no regard to cost, and had literally repaired or replaced thousands of parts on these planes. It is hard to translate that knowledge over to the younger generation of pilots and mechanics. CAF has been around long enough to have the most experienced pilots and mechanics, and the largest knowledge transfer, probably contributes to their safety record. CHIEF
  22. Mostly dogfights, or structural issues. The engines were pretty simple and reliable, but the planes, themselves were made of fabric and wood. Pull too many Gs and it would rip the wings off. Not a lot of R&D stress testing back then. CHIEF
  23. I bet ol' Orville shit his pants when his Wright Flyer actually left the ground. WWI fighter pilots didn't have parachutes, and a life expectancy of just a few weeks. A whole different mindset. Dying famously seemed like the trend at the time, going out in a blaze of glory doing what you loved. Here, again, you have a Commerative or a collective of guys with pockets not deep enough. They do, it purely out of passion. But passion alone isn't safe enough. The plane can't be flown often enough to keep the pilot proficient. It's like being accurate with a rifle at 600 yards, it takes practice, you can't maintain that accuracy only shooting 5-6 shots a year. CHIEF
  24. Absolutely not a maintenance issue. It was a pilot proficiency issue. The pilot should have known about the blind spot, he wasn't paying attention early enough. He was directly over the B-17, it was under his nose, impossible to see from any angle unless the B-17 were to turn before the P-63 when the P-63 pilot could have seen it before his leading edge covered him up again. The air boss should have made the P-63 pilot aware that there was a B-17 under him, and to maintain altitude. Who knows? Too many planes in the air in a congested area, and too many changes in altitude. The P-63 never made any last second effort to avoid the collision, thus my hypothesis that he never saw him. These pilots pay too much money, or maintenance time to want to just fly straight and level. Who wants to buy an F1 car and drive it 60 mph around the track. Airshows are like that, and they are all "Newbies" in a sense. I bet none of them have over 100 hours of seat time in anything they fly due to cost. I remember when you could purchase a P-51 for between $300-500k. My dream plane. As soon as I made enough money to purchase one, that was what I was going to do, and people would get to watch me at airshows. Big dreams for a 16 year old. After being around Don and Howard, I realized that the purchase price was just a drop in the bucket. You needed to pour that much into it, annually, for maintenance and enough fuel to stay proficient, and this was on $2.00/gal 100LL. These warbird pilots are living their dream, however, they were completely unaware of how much extra dough you must have above the purchase price to be safe in it. Something that my time as a mechanic and being around warbirds, and their owners taught me. It was a bitter truth, and a crushed dream. I remember throwing full blown toddler temper tantrums when we had to go to church on Sunday night (my Dad was the song leader) and missing Baa Baa Black Sheep. No VCR, no recording it. I think my mom was the one that called ABC and had it moved to Tuesday night. I slept, ate, and drank WWII warbirds. Yeah, F8F, I was bourbon typing, had to look this morning and see what I had typed. CHIEF
  25. Thats the thing, this is 75 year old "cutting edge" technology. Basically flathead Fords going 450 mph. It is getting tougher and tougher to source parts, so mechanics and machinists are having to repair broken parts manually (welding, duck tape, remachining taking off material thickness). But the biggest problem, is the operating costs. These planes were designed to fly on 100/150 AV gas, they weren't designed to fly on 100LL, but 100LL will work at lower power at lower altitudes. 100LL fouls the plugs horribly, the plugs need to be cleaned after a 6-8 hours of flight. We had a crop duster at our FBO that used an AgCat with an O-650 P&W (single row), built in 1943. I cleaned his plugs every other day during spraying season. Also, the 100LL was bad on the brass valve seats. We eventually had a machinist make some out of billet nickel for extra hardness. Considering this, and the cost of 100LL, pilots can only afford to fly them a couple of hours a month. There is no way to maintain proficiency at the controls. You do not have the US government providing unlimited fuel and a sea of mechanics to maintain these aircraft, they are too cost prohibitive. CHIEF
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