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I always knew the Navy had it good. If you blew a gasket
or O-ring in the AF, you made it on the spot. I still remember sitting in
Crete in a C-54, making a oil cooler gasket with a roll of cork, a razor blade,
a ball-peen hammer, and a lot of swearing......"Off we goooo...."
Greg Ward
Lancair 20B in Progress
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2008 4:56
PM
Subject: [FlyRotary] Re: Various Possible
solutions to coolant in housing
In the olden days, the Navy had an NSN (National Stock Number) for an "O"
ring kit. It came in a wonderful maple box with chrome trim and finger
spliced corners. It contained a vulcanizing iron with grooves for a number of
ring diameters. The Nitral material came on rolls with another NSN for each
size. The test for an "O" ring was to pull on it until it failed. So to
determine if the liquid goop that joined the ring ends was still young
enough to use, you would make a test ring. Put on the goop, clamp it in the
iron and cook it. Then let it cool and pull it apart. It should fail at a
location other than the joint. If that was the case, you built your new ring
in the correct diameter and completed repairs.
That kit was superseded by a kit that had just the rolls of material and
a tube of super glue. The same rule applied as far as a test piece was
concerned. The new kit was in a sturdy cardboard box. We thought that
consumption would die off on the older kit in the wood box, but it didn't, it
went up. The original kit cost us $2,000.00 each. The new kit cost about
$200.00. So the savings we should have seen did not materialize.
So I called some of the users to see why they wanted both kits and kept
ordering the old one. Like the punch line to a joke.......We like the box.
They kept the rolls of material and the wooden box. discarded the iron. and
put the new kit in the old box. They had a place for that box on submarines,
and the cardboard box was a hair too big to fit the space. Other folks liked
the box and used it for other kits, to get out of having anything cardboard in
the flyaway kits or whatever they were doing. So people ordered a $2,000.00
"O" ring kit to get the box, and some of them just pitched the kit. So, we
established an NSN for the box. We killed the NSN for the old kit and sent the
new kit, in the same box as the old kit. We placed an automated message for
anyone who ordered the kit, to suggest that if it was just the box they
wanted, then order this NSN for just the box. Then we saw the savings we
were after. "O" rings are at once simple and complex.
Things are seldom as they appear.
Sitting on high in Crystal Palace speculating as to the reasons for this
and that, is of no value.
It is the horses mouth that tells the tail...
Lynn E. Hanover
In a message dated 3/15/2008 5:47:35 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lendich@optusnet.com.au writes:
Lynn,
If it wasn't for Kelly, with my encouragement,
as I was trying to establish the correct sizes from Australia at the time,
the correct sizes would never have been identified as, 'you know who' was
preaching his usual, 'he who is always right sermon' about the sizes. As far
as I know those sizes ( the wrong ones) are still being bandied about even
though I supplied the correct sizes to him, for the benefit of other
builders.
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