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A neat WWII story to compliment Richard's excellent essay on fuel.
A friend of mine, who was a B25 mechanic in WWII, was based in Italy. One
day, one of the crew chiefs shows up with an Italian Army motorcycle. He is
tight-lipped about where it came from, but over a few beverages that night,
he divulges that there is a rebuild facility with piles of them right down
the road, and he traded some rations to the company watch man for his mount.
Two days later, everybody is running around on the things. A week later,
the races on the runways start. Seeking to edge the competition, they start
adding small bits of Avgas to the mixture, to get them going faster. Then
the base commander forbids them from using the 60 octane as that is harder
to get than the avgas, and they are going to run out of it soon as the race
season is in high gear. Okay, the enlisted grumble, we've got plenty of
avgas. So they start running straight avgas in the bikes. Three weeks
later, all the bikes are laying around, all with burned valves.
>From a friend no longer with us- Ed, the only B25 mechanic I knew.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jul 02 2000 - 23:51:28 PDT