By John Switala

A chip off the old board

After an inspection and clean up of the club hangars the state of the shelves were woeful. The chipboard shelves had succumbed to the ravages of time. They were brittle with little bits of wood, let’s call them chips, flaking off at the most minor of touches.

It also meant that wiping down the shelves was almost impossible. One wipe meant a handful of shelf bits and a slightly thinner shelf!

Gerry Hogan was about helping with a general clean up and said “I’m back to work next week”; (Gerry works at the chipboard factory north east of the airfield, I felt a very useful suggestion coming up!), “I’ll see if I can get a couple of sheet seconds”.

That’s the last I heard of it until I was up at Benalla last weekend, when upon during a “review” inspection, there was revealed, new shelves! All cut and bolted it! And they weren’t just chipboard but melomine laminate! So nice and smooth and better at withstanding wipe downs. So no problem if they are continually kept clean with a quick wipe down every day!

So next time you see him, thank Gerry for his efforts and cost saving for the club!

A new technique

One of the things that need to happen every now and again is cleaning the dirt from the groove the club hangar doors run in. The groove allows a tongue that is attached to each wheel on the hangar door to track the doors properly; it also stops the doors blowing in or out. The weight of the doors is taken by the wheels and if everything is fine one person should quite easily be able to slide the hangars doors open or closed. However, the arch enemy of the groove, dirt, conspires against us. Dirt slowly falls into the groove and invites his friend, small stones, to join him. They get in the groove and have compacting parties. After a while the doors get harder and harder to open because we are pushing the guiding tongue against compacted dirt and small stones.

While the blocked grooves are not the only cause of the doors being hard to open, bent wheel axles, no axle grease and no grease swabbed on the top rail are also culprits, the blocked groove has, in the past, been the main contributor to stiff doors.

As a part of a recent hangar cleaning event, I found the “hangar door groove cleaning claw” which is a device built by Doug Robinson (you can tell Doug’s a carpenter because of the welding). It’s a robust steel pole about 50mm in diameter and about 1400mm high. At the business end it has a metal cross piece and protruding under this is the Claw (pronounced craw for some reason). It is stored in the workshop hangar, just inside the door on the left hand side against the wall.

The idea is that you run the craw along the groove and this action forces the dirt and stones that have fallen in there out. The dirt that comes out just sort of hangs around on either side of the groove. You then need to get a broom (long wooden handled thing with bristles on one end) and sweep (action of moving broom back and forth, with bristle end down) the dirt away. Unfortunately, as the dirt lifted up from the groove is on both sides, and sometimes in between two of the grooves, some of the dirt falls back into the groove during the sweeping phase of the operation. So you get the craw out again. And then sweep, and craw and sweep and craw. So the long day draws on.

While in the process of crawing and sweeping a few “helpful” guys came over and offered advice like “You missed a bit there” and so on. However, when one is holding a 1.4 metre steel pole with an 80 mm steel claw reminiscent of a T-Rex fingernail, the abuse and “helpfulness” subsides rather quickly. One bright spark even suggested vacuuming up the stones and dirt. We even tried the idea! No good. Then Chris Becek came over, looked at what we were doing, saw the vacuum failure, noticed the air compressor and said “why don’t we blow the bloody stones and dirt away?” As it happens with truly brilliant ideas a bit of luck happened. Bob Fox was helping repair an undercarriage door in the workshop and suggested that the workshop compressor would have more grunt and helped by getting a number of air hose extensions so we could reach the full extent of the track.

Chris borrowed one of those pistol air guns and fired compressed air up the groove. Well, dirt and stones where blown out every where. Getting the angle of the air stream was important; too steep and stones and dirt would ricochet back at you. Too shallow and it didn’t do the work. So there we where on our knees firing the air pistol down the groove and really cleaning it out well. I actually saw the steel at the bottom of the groove – first time in 16 years! Chris then went a step further and came out of the workshop with a short broom handle and a roll of duct tape. He taped the pistol to the handle, taped the trigger to on and we could stand up and clean. Magic or as Chris said “we are not peasants to be kneeling when we work”. Helped my back anyway!

We still needed to use the craw to loosen some of the harder bits but the air was really getting rid of the dirt and stones. The whole job took less than 40 minutes and the groove was so clean you could put a tongue in it!

So thanks very much to Chris Becek for a helpful addition to our cleaning arsenal.