Tag Archives: education

Minimum Metal Gauges

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A handy chart for choosing metals for jewelry making.

My “day job” may be flying helicopters, but I moonlight as a jewelry artist. I’m constantly looking for reference materials to help me choose the right tools and materials for making jewelry. I find charts extremely handy since I can print them out and attach them to a wall beside my jewelry making bench in my shop. No need to rely on my memory since the chart is right there.

I stumbled upon one on the Rio Grande website recently. It was almost what I needed. I modified it to add information I needed and remove metals I don’t work with. (I only work with sterling, Argentium, and Fine silver and copper.) Here’s the result:

Recommended Metal Gauges
Table of metal gauges. “NR” means not recommended.

You can download a copy in PDF format from my public Dropbox.

If you find posts about jewelry making interesting, please take a moment to leave a comment and let me know. Thanks!

The Great Loop

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I read a book about a trip I’d like to take.

Although it’s still very much winter here in North Central Washington State, my mind has been somewhat consumed with boating these days.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may remember the post I did some years ago about an ill-fated trip to a friend’s house out in the San Juan Islands. (It was an ill-fated post, too. The friend I wrote about seemed to take great offense at what I’d said about him and another friend apparently read between the lines and thought I was blogging about her. My response to both: Really?) In the post, I mentioned my friend’s boat, which I really liked, and how I wanted to get a similar one.

Ranger Tug R-27
Spending four winters in a row in a truck camper has really prepared me for long-term living on a boat this size. It’s basically my camper on a boat.

Over time, I discovered the 27-foot Ranger Tug that I have my eye on. This boat has all the comforts of home — well, at least all the comforts of my truck camper — in a towable package. That means I could store it in my garage between long trips out on the Columbia River, Lake Chelan, Roosevelt Lake, the San Juan Islands, and the Inside Passage. I could even take it south for the winter — imagine spending December and January on Lake Havasu in Arizona?

I also began thinking of other adventures where I could take such a boat. I immediately thought of the Intracoastal Waterway up the east coast of the US. And then maybe up the Hudson River. And the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes. And wouldn’t it be amazing if I could find some way down the Mississippi back to the Gulf of Mexico and around the Florida Keys back to my starting place?

What I had just imagined was something that actually existed and had been accomplished by many people: the Great Loop.

The Great Loop

Per the America’s Great Loop Cruiser’s Association website,

The Great Loop is a circumnavigation of the eastern U.S., and part of Canada. The route includes the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the New York State Canals, the Canadian Canals, the Great Lakes, the inland rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. “Loopers” take on this adventure of a lifetime aboard their own boat.

Great Loop Map
Here’s the map of the route. Note that there are two ways to get from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, two ways to get through the Great Lakes, two ways to get from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and two ways to navigate Florida. This makes it possible to do the trip a number of different ways.

The website has a wealth of information about this roughly 6,000 mile journey, including many resources for learning about the route and points of interest along the way. Honestly, the website can tell you a lot more about the Loop than I can; I’ve only begun exploring it.

A Challenge, An Adventure

If you know me well, you should know that I live for challenges. I’ve had three successful careers (so far) for a reason: I get bored easily. After an initial start in the business world as an auditor and financial analyst — what was I thinking? — my writing hobby turned into a career as a freelance writer. When that generated a bunch of fun money, I learned to fly helicopters, bought a helicopter, and turned that into a career as a helicopter pilot. These days, I’m keeping myself amused by learning jewelry skills and techniques, but I can’t really call that a new career — at least not yet. (Maybe in a few years?)

In each case, it was the challenge that drove me, even if I didn’t realize it. I always want to learn and do new things. I want to get good at them. When I can actually earn a living doing them, I’m rewarded and motivated to do and learn more.

Taking a boat on a 6,000 mile trip on rivers, oceans, canals, and lakes — now that’s a challenge.

I’ve always been a bit of an explorer. I bought a Jeep to explore the desert on the ground. I’ve used helicopters to explore the desert, mountains, canyons, lakes, rivers, coasts — you name it — from the air. In the past, I’d done boating trips with a focus on exploration: a rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, a house boating trip on Lake Powell, small boat trips on the Hudson, East, Harlem, Colorado, and Columbia Rivers, a 12-day cruise up the inside passage on a small boat. Imagine how much I could explore on a Great Loop trip!

Of course, there are hurdles to jump. Getting the boat and learning to pilot it safely and effectively is the first big challenge. Learning what I need to know to plan and execute a long boat trip is another. This isn’t something I would do without proper preparation. But as I research the things I need to know, I realize that it’s definitely doable. A real goal for my post-retirement years.

Reading First Person Acounts

I started my research about six months ago, before I went south for the winter. I searched for books about the Great Loop. There are a lot of them. It seems that many people who do this journey like to write books about it.

There are different ways to do the trip and a lot of them depend on the size and style of the boat you’re doing it with. I wanted to read books written by people kind of like me — not super rich, motoring in a smallish boat. (Yes, 27 feet is considered small for this trip.) A lot of the books out there were by couples in giant yachts and I didn’t want to read those. Chances are, I’d have a budget for the trip, which meant I wouldn’t be able to spend every single night along the way at a full-service marina. I’d have to boondock (the RVing word) or lie at anchor (the boating phrase) for at least half the nights. So I wanted to read books by people who had similar experiences to what I might have.

I sampled a few books in Kindle format and wasn’t very impressed. One of the drawbacks of this age of self-publishing is that anyone can do it — even if they can’t write. One book sample read like an infomercial for the book, with lots of repetition and apparently no editing. Another was similarly uninteresting to me, although I can’t remember why. But a third…well, I thought that had promise. I bought it and read it yesterday.

A Book Review

Crossing The Wake
Here’s the book I read first about motoring the Great Loop.

Crossing the Wake: One Woman’s Great Loop Adventure by Tanya Binford is almost the kind of book you might expect. The subtitle tells you that the book is about a woman’s trip doing the Great Loop and hints that she’s doing it alone (which she mostly did). I tend to shy away from women’s books because I have trouble identifying with the themes they usually include: the trials of motherhood, dealing with sexual discrimination, and fighting male dominance. This book, fortunately, didn’t have much of that — although it certain had more than enough for me. Unfortunately, as I discovered while turning page after virtual page, it didn’t really have what I wanted to read, either.

You see, although the author wrote this book about her journey, it read more like a catalog of fears, challenges, and social activities than a travelog. With virtually no boating experience, she decided she wanted to do the trip. To prepare, she moved from the Arizona desert to the coast of South (I think) Carolina and bought her young adult son a boat. Over and over again, she tells the reader how little confidence she had in her skills while she let her son do the piloting. She shares many anecdotes about needing the help of a man to do one thing or another. Yet she buys one boat after another to learn what she needs to know and build her skills. That’s admirable, but I don’t believe she had the skills she needed when she finally started the trip.

The first part of the book explains what she was doing for a living — she was a psychiatric registered nurse who was able to meet with patients through video calls (this was before the pandemic) — with side stories about some of her patients, co-workers, and bosses. It also covers some of her preparations, with lots of details of the (mostly) men who helped her and the (mostly) women who worried about her doing the trip on her own.

The second, longer part of the book was about the actual trip. Here’s where the definition of “solo” gets hazy. You see, although she was alone on her boat for most of the trip, she also traveled among other “Loopers” who she would see, on and off, throughout her trip. The book is one story after another about meeting this couple/boat here and that couple/boat there and having “docktails” and dinner and shore trips with all these people. It was a social report. There were very few details, especially in the first part of the trip, about navigation, points of interest, or the traveling itself. When she did try to give details, she fell short or used incorrect names. (It’s New York Harbor, not Hudson Bay (which is in Canada); the New York Thruway, not the New York Expressway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, not the Tappen Zee Bridge. These are the things I caught because I know them; how many other mistakes did she make?)

Along the way, she confirmed, over and over, that she was in way over her head on this trip, lacking either confidence or skills that she really should have had. And if that wasn’t bad enough, halfway through the book/trip she admits that the autopilot and radar don’t work properly. (I cannot, for a minute, imagine taking a boat on a 6,000-mile solo trip without an autopilot, let alone drive a boat in unfamiliar water in fog without radar yet the author did both.) Yes, she survived the trip, but I felt that she struggled with her own shortcomings to do so.

What did I want from the book? I guess I just wanted more details about the trip itself. More about navigation, overnight stops (other than to name them), unusual boating/navigation rules/situations. She did provide some of this, but not nearly as much as I wanted. Instead, I was treated to her stories about her bullying her mom on part of the trip, men who made passes at her, and her emotional turmoil when another boater she’d had a fling with found another non-boating woman and married her.

And frankly, I found her side story about a patient who had killed herself when she (the author) left her job to start the trip disturbing and unwelcome.

If the author happens upon this blog post and reads it, I’m sorry to be so brutal. But I’ve filed this book with most of the other “women’s books” I’ve come across. I probably should not have read it.

Did I get anything out of the book at all? Yes. I learned that a woman with very little experience driving a boat slight smaller but similar in style to what I want to buy completed the trip by herself.

If she could do it, so could I.

Making Plans

So I’ve set this up as a new goal for myself: motor the great loop before I turn 65. I have just over 5 years to:

  • Get back in shape. I’ve let myself go a bit and that’s causing aches and pains that I simply should not have at my age. Time to slim back down, get more exercise, and prep for being able to walk a very narrow gunwale.
  • Buy a suitable boat. That Ranger Tug is looking good, but I do have a friend trying to talk me into something else, so I’m not 100% sold on it yet.
  • Spend a lot of time on the boat to become an expert on handling it. This might sound weird, but to me, flying a helicopter in most conditions is like driving a car. I’d like to get like that behind the wheel of a boat. Practice — especially practice in challenging conditions like wind, currents, and rough water — makes perfect.
  • Spend some time with a boat mechanic. The goal is to learn the basics of what might break and how I can fix it — or at least enable to limp to a marina for a real fix.
  • Learn everything I need to know about navigation on the Great Loop’s waterways. There’s a lot to learn — including navigation on Canadian waterways.
  • Prepare the boat for a very long trip. That includes a last-minute tuneup of the engine and other systems and packing the gear I’ll need (and leaving behind the gear I won’t).
  • Get the boat to a starting point, launch it, and get under way. Whether I do this alone or with a travel companion depends on what’s going on in my life when the time comes to start.

Chapman Piloting & Seamanship
Chapman Piloting and Seamanship is the bible for learning about boating in the United States. I’ve got this book in print and in Kindle format and have been reading various chapters to immerse myself in boating information.

A lot of this actually ties in nicely with a related goal: getting my boat captain’s license. I’d like very much to be able to make a bit of income with this boat since it’ll cost so much to acquire and operate. (But still not as much as a helicopter.) Even if I make enough to cover my personal boating costs, I’ll be very happy. But to legally do that, I need the proper boat captain’s license, which requires experience on the water, training, and passing scores on a test. I’m already beginning to study for all that.

But whether I become a boat captain or not, motoring the Great Loop is a set goal. Let’s see if I can do it.

Leaving a Parked Helicopter with the Engine Running

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An explanation of something I said in one of my recent YouTube videos.

I recently published a video on the FlyingMAir YouTube channel where I flew from my cherry season landing zone to my house. I was going to do a much longer flight that day with a friend and, when I reached the helicopter, I realized I’d forgotten my iPad, which I use with Foreflight for situational awareness and detailed airport information in flight. Faced with a choice of taking 20 to 30 minutes to drive back home and get it or just making the one minute flight up to my house on my way to pick up my friend, I went with the quicker option.

In the video, as I’m coming in for landing, I lament that a helicopter isn’t like a car and I can’t just keep it running while I go inside the house. I never explained why. A helicopter pilot — and even an airplane pilot — should know, but I forget sometimes that my video audience isn’t always directly involved in aviation. I got several questions — and a good story — in the video comments about leaving an unattended helicopter with the engine running. I thought I’d take a moment to share and expand on what was said in those comments.

First, Understand How a Helicopter Flies

The main danger of leaving a helicopter running while unattended is the possibility of it become airborne enough to move and crash. Never fear — if it does get airborne at all, it’s not going to fly away by itself. It will crash and likely pretty damn quickly. More on that in a moment.

Dynamic Rollover
The usual outcome of a helicopter trying to take off by itself is something like dynamic rollover, which is shown here. The helicopter gets hooked on something on the ground and rolls over. (This photo by John Murphy is from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. (Thanks, John, for sharing photos to help bloggers illustrate things like this.))

For a helicopter to get light on its skids and airborne, it needs a two main things:

  • Rotor RPM. The main rotor(s) must be spinning. Theoretically, a Robinson can fly at 80% RPM plus 1% RPM per thousand feet of density altitude. So at my house on a warm summer day, I’d estimate 83% RPM would be enough to fly, although we always fly at 100% RPM (unless there’s some sort of in-flight problem that makes this impossible, in which case, we’d land as soon as possible). For this reason, it’s never a good idea to leave the rotors spinning at anywhere near 100% RPM unless the pilot is at the controls, paying attention and ready to fly.
  • Collective Pitch. The collective control in the pilot’s left hand changes the pitch on the rotor blades the same amount (collectively) when it’s pulled up. With the collective full down, the blades are “flat” (or close enough for argument’s sake) and should not be able to get the angle of attack they need to produce lift. (And yes, the collective does look quite a bit like a compact car’s parking break lever.)

It’s the pilot’s responsibility to throttle down to an appropriately low RPM when on the ground. A Robinson’s cool-down RPM is between 60% and 70%; far too low for the helicopter to fly. When I flew at Papillon years ago, we’d just throttle down to the stop, which I think left us at around 70% RPM (but don’t quote me on that; it’s been 16 years). There are a few reasons why a pilot might not do this, but we don’t need to split hairs here because all of those reasons involve a pilot staying in the cockpit.

All the helicopters I know provide safety controls to prevent the collective from creeping up by itself. This is usually in the form of a collective friction lever (or possibly knob?) that the pilot should secure as part of her shutdown process. It becomes automatic. You set down, you throttle down to a cool-down or idle RPM (depending on your needs), and set the friction. Half the time, I don’t even remember doing it, but when I look down, it’s set.

So Is It Safe to Leave the Engine Running without a Pilot on Board?

Doing both of these things — reducing RPM and securing the collective in a full down position — should prevent a helicopter from misbehaving when parked when the engine is running. And lots of pilots will actually walk away from a helicopter with the engine running. Let me elaborate.

Suppose I was sitting in the helicopter with the engine running and I realized I needed something out of the back seat storage area. I need to get out to fetch it. Would I shut down?

The answer is no. I’d start by confirming low RPM and secured collective. Then I’d take off my headset and seat belt, open my door, climb out, open the back door, fetch what I needed, close the back door, and get back into my seat. During that entire time, I’d be well within reach of the controls if I started to hear or feel something weird going on.

Likewise, when I worked at Papillon, they’d routinely land a Bell 206L in the Native American village of Supai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The pilot would throttle down and secure the collective, then get out, walk around the front (never back!) of the helicopter, open the luggage compartment, and pull out luggage for the departing passengers. (That was back in 2004; I have no idea if they still do this but assume they do. It makes sense given the possibility of restarting difficulties without a ground support crew/equipment.)

Meanwhile, up at the Grand Canyon South Rim base, if a pilot needed to use the bathroom between flights, he’d have to wait until another pilot came down and sat in his seat until he returned. No passengers would be loaded during this time. This was a smart safety measure that some folks might consider overkill. I don’t.

A friend of mine who owned an R44 started up his helicopter on the ramp of his home base airport, which, at the time, I believe was Salinas in California. As he was warming up the engine, he realized he was missing a chart. Rather than shutting down, he simply left the helicopter empty, idling on the ramp, while he went to the on-airport pilot shop and bought the needed chart. He got into a ton of trouble with airport management when an airplane pilot complained about it. Friend or not, I think he exercised poor judgement when he did that.

The Story in Comments

One of my YouTube channel’s commenters, George Reynolds, had this to say about my video:

Not like a car, leaving the engine running. Reminds me or a true accident report where the pilot landed beside a house to impress a friend and got out, leaving the 3 forestry workers in the helicopter with the engine running. One of them thought the “handbrake” ought to be applied and the consequences was a wreck, but fortunately no injuries….

My first thought was OMG, what a story! It’s a perfect example of what can happen when a pilot fails to properly brief his passengers.

Going back to my original situation, if I had a responsible adult passenger in the front seat when I landed at my house, I’d throttle down, secure the collective, and advise the passenger to leave the controls alone, especially the collective, which should not be raised under any situation. Then I’d feel comfortable enough leaving the engine running.

What Could Happen

George’s story sent me to the NTSB database to look for the accident in question. I searched using all kinds of key words based on his story: handbrake, brake, house, passengers, pulled collective. I did not find a single story that matched.

But I did find others. Here are a few summaries; emphasis added:

Accident report LAX97FA149 on April 7, 1997 in Los Angeles, CA tells this story:

The pilot exited the helicopter to escort a deplaning passenger. The student pilot rated passenger was left sitting in the helicopter with instructions not to touch the controls. While the pilot was standing nearby, the helicopter began bouncing up and down in a resonant mode. The pilot ran back to the helicopter and pulled the fuel flow control lever into the cut-off position. The helicopter yawed to the right and settled back on the deck. Investigation revealed the full down position of the collective was spring loaded to keep tension against the control lock. An inspection of the helicopter revealed that the collective was not down and locked, nor were the frictions tightly applied. The manufacturer reported instances in which the collective lock was not seated properly, and consequently, the collective became released while the engine was running. If the lock slips off collective, the spring’s tension could force the control to move upward. No malfunction or failure was found with the engine or rotor systems.

So either the pilot hadn’t locked the collective or the collective lock had released due to a known design flaw.

Accident report LAX07CA034 on November 11, 2006 in Boulder City, NV says:

The helicopter rolled over after the pilot exited with the engine running and rotors turning to disconnect and move the auxiliary power unit (APU) to a secure location. The pilot left the helicopter running at 100 percent because he was charging the battery. The pilot’s back was to the helicopter when he heard the engine sound change. He turned around, and saw the front skids lift off the ground. The helicopter started to move in a backwards direction, and rolled over and went down an embankment.

Sorry, folks, but this is a stupid pilot trick, plain and simple. Never leave the helicopter at 100% RPM when there’s no pilot at the controls.

Accident report LAX01FA252 on July 21, 2001 in Los Angeles, CA reports:

The pilot got out of the helicopter with the engines running and the rotors turning to check on the security of a cabin door, and the unmanned helicopter began moving on the helipad and rolled over. The pilot had completed a nightime, helicopter, air taxi flight, and was preparing to depart the elevated helipad to reposition the helicopter to the operator’s base. After deplaning his passengers the pilot returned to the cockpit and was preparing to depart when he noticed a door unsecured indication on the instrument panel for the left cabin door. The passengers had deplaned through the right-hand door and the left door annunciation had not been on during the inbound flight. He thought one of the passengers might have released the left door latch inadvertently while preparing to deplane. He idled the engines and exited the cockpit to check the door. He reclosed the door and returned to the cockpit; however, the door open annunciation came on again. He recalled leaving the cockpit “2 or 3 times” to deal with the door and said he was “frustrated with it.” He did not recall retarding the engine power control levers to ground idle before leaving the cockpit the final time. While out of the cockpit, the wheel-equipped helicopter started to move as the pilot was returning to the cockpit. He recalled it was moving toward the edge of the helipad. He returned to the cockpit; however, before he could regain control there was a confusing sequence of events and the next thing he knew the helicopter was on its side. The pilot reported there were no mechanical discrepancies with the helicopter up to the time of the event. He remarked that it was very light [weight] with no one else on board. On the deck of the helipad there was a tire skid pattern consistent with a dynamic rollover event. The engine power control levers were found in the “fly” position.

I really feel for this guy. Something is acting up, giving him grief, and he’s frustrated. Unfortunately, that can also make you sloppy. I don’t know much about Sikorsky S-76 helicopters and nothing about the “fly” position, but I have to think that a helicopter should be set to “fly” when the pilot intends to fly. Maybe someone reading this can fill in more details? Since the chances of me ever flying an S-76 are very slim, I’m not interested in researching it.

Why This Matters

I’m a student in the School of Thought that says the more you know about what could happen, the better equipped you are to make smarter safety-related decisions.

In my video, my landing zone was good, there was little or no wind, the collective friction on my helicopter works fine, and I could have throttled all the day down to 60% RPM if I wanted to. The chances of the helicopter moving an inch while I was in my house were nearly zero.

Nearly.

There’s always a chance that something unexpected will happen. Having lost one helicopter already, I’m not interested in losing another. So I do what I think is safe, even if other folks think it’s overly cautious.

If the folks in the four accident stories I shared here had been students in the same School of Thought I’m in, their stories wouldn’t need to be shared.