View Single Post
Old 10-19-2011, 07:51 PM   #93
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Windlass, not a clue!!!

Looking at these illustrations it continues to amaze me that people can not only design, but build things like this. I've been at Boeing for a long, long time. I've shot in our fabrication plants where huge slabs of aluminum come in on special freight cars and are machined down into wing skins. The mill beds are a hundred feet long and the aluminum slabs weigh Lord knows how many tons. Yet they still require vacuum to hold the aluminum flat and keep it from shifting. And on and on and on.

When you go to an airport there will almost always be someone who looks at the 747 or 777 or Airbus out the window and says, "I can't believe something that big can fly." I have no problem with that whatsoever. They fly for the same reason the little Cessna or Beaver that I fly flies. What I can't believe, even after decades in the business and watching us do it, is that anyone can build one.

I find it amazing that people not only designed but could fabricate out of raw metal something as "simple" as the Ford diesels in our boat. Wood I can sort of understand. But metal? Amazing to me.


-- Edited by Marin on Wednesday 19th of October 2011 08:53:42 PM
Marin is offline   Reply With Quote