Cheerful Curmudgeon

A complete lack of ideas and the power to express them.

Art Zemon's Blog Posts

Bede BD-4C Rudder Controls Access Panel

The Bede BD-4C airplane has a whole bunch of hardware inside the back end of the fuselage. The two rudder cables (one from each rudder pedal) are attached to a steel bellcrank. The bellcrank operates the front end of a push-pull rod (the back end of which is attached to a control horn on the bottom […]

Fabricating the BD-4C Dorsal Fin

In our last episode, our intrepid BD- had built a bending brake but been forced out of his airplane factory by the sweltering St. Louis summer heat. Once the temperature dropped, I was able to make the bend for the middle of the BD-4C dorsal fin and then cut it to shape, ready to have the flanges […]

Sheet Metal Bending Brake for Dorsal and Ventral Fins

I made a little progress on my Bede BD-4C airplane this week, though it is not photogenic enough to show here. I made two small steel plates which will attach the tail skid to the fuselage. They are drilled and clecoed in place, waiting for the welder to bend the ½ inch 4130 steel tube into […]

Straightened the Crooked Tail

I discovered a serious problem with my Bede BD-4C airplane as I was getting ready to install the top fuselage skin: the horizontal part of the tail was crooked. Specifically, the copilot’s side of the tail was about three inches higher (above the floor) than the pilot’s side. I did some careful measuring and figured out that the […]

Bede BD-4C Wingtips

The wingtips for my Bede BD-4C airplane arrived today, a very nice surprise since I have been having a hellish time getting the horizontal stabilator attached parallel to the wing spar. Here are pictures, in gorgeous carbon fiber. I am dearly looking forward to the day when I can attach these to the wings.

Making an Inspection Port

After spending much time and effort to properly create the large fuselage skins for my Bede BD-4C airplane, you would think that I would want to keep them nice and whole. You would think wrong. Two of them needed large holes cut into them. The top skin needed a hole for the vertical stabilizer’s spar […]

Bottom Fuselage Skins Bonded

Big weekend: I have bonded the first fuselage skins onto my Bede BD-4C airplane. I painted 3M Scotch-Weld #10 Contact Adhesive onto both the skin and the fuselage angles and then “just” stuck the two together. Here are a few photos. There is actually more adhesive on the plane than is visible in the pictures. The […]

More Fuselage Skin

The rear part of the fuselage of the Bede BD-4C airplane that I am building is about 11 feet long. There are eight pieces of skin which cover it. The aft-most pieces are 0.016 inches thick and about 7.5 feet long. The four pieces farther forward are 0.020 inches thick about 3.5 feet long. I […]

Installing Lift Reserve

As you know, if you are a citizen of the universe, I am building a Bede BD-4C airplane and I have been writing about the process here on my blog for the last couple of years. Today I am going to write about something that few aviators, and even fewer homebuilders, write about. I am […]

MySQL + UTF-8 + PHP 5.3.10 + JSON = Trouble

Yesterday, I spent longer than I care to admit debugging an update to an old PHP script. It fetched a string from a MySQL database and (here’s the new part) passed the string to json_encode(). That call failed when the data included the multibyte characters ¼ or ½ or ¾. All of my attempts to remove the multibyte […]

Progress on the Fuselage Skin

I have made a bunch of progress on the first piece of fuselage skin for my Bede BD-4C airplane. This is the piece on the top of the fuselage, at the rear. It sits under the vertical stabilizer so, no surprise, I got to cut a hole in the skin for the stabilizer’s spar to […]

Cut the First Skin

Tonight, I screwed up my courage and made a diagonal cut along a 4 foot by 8 foot sheet of aluminum. This is the first piece of fuselage skin for my Bede BD-4C airplane.

Python Singleton

I needed a singleton database class in a Python 2.7 program and wrote it this way. class Singleton(type): _instances = {} def __call__(cls, *args, **kwargs): if cls not in cls._instances: cls._instances[cls] = super(Singleton, cls).__call__(*args, **kwargs) return cls._instances[cls] class Database(): __metaclass__ = Singleton def __init__(self): self.db = MySQLdb.connect(…) I like this pattern but I realized that […]

Transurethral Resection of the Prostate (T.U.R.P.)

So you want the gory details about Transurethral Resection of the Prostate (T.U.R.P.)? OK. I am happy to oblige. Here is the nitty-gritty about how I came to have a T.U.R.P., how it went, and how I feel now that it is done. WARNING: This essay is explicit about symptoms and body parts associated with […]

Goal Achieved: Lost 32 Pounds

  I have lost 32 pounds. 🙂 It took a year and I am very pleased. I used the Weight Watchers mobile app and self-discipline. I did not bother with the WW meetings. For the last few weeks, I have maintained my weight without following the WW program, just eating sensibly, so this morning I […]

Prostate: Unintelligent Design at Its Worst

Want a chuckle? No, want a belly aching guffaw? Check out the male urinary plumbing. You got a nice small tube running from the bladder out through the “you know what” to the outside world. Wrapped around that tube is the prostate gland, which grows and hardens over the years, squeezing the tube until nothing flows […]

Mitsubishi i-MiEV Electric Car Range

Several of us have been discussing the range of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car in a Google+ community. What started as a simple query, “What kind of range do you guys get?  62 EPA miles?” made me realize that I rarely think about our i’s range in terms of miles. Instead, I am simply concerned with […]

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