Changing direction – magnetos and other heirloom ideas.

I use this blog like a diary to write about things I’m musing on, and to keep in the habit of writing. It’s Christmas, the time of dreary, Victorian comedy-of-manners posts about who offended whom over Christmas etc.,.

So I thought I’d write about something interesting instead. Magneto ignition systems!

Groundbreaking technology! 130 years ago!

I’ve spent a wee bit of time in the last few days mooching around small aircraft, with a torch. And the thing that is the most surprising to people is that small aircraft utilise magnetos for their ignition systems. They use two – for redundancy in the system. When you’re running your pre-flight tests you flick them on and off, and the revs drop accordingly.

Magnetos are 130 year old technology but they’re used on small aircraft for the obvious reason that they don’t require an ‘outside’ charging system – there’s no battery or other circuits to excite them. The ‘battery’ is the movement of the prop. This moves the permanent magnet around the windings. If the prop is moving, they can produce spark, and if the plane is moving then the prop can keep moving. Simple.

Magnetos need to be serviced every 500 hours, and what surprised me is that this is really expensive. The job itself is pretty straightforward. As a young apprentice I spent many hours keeping myself out of trouble by overhauling a towering shelf of aged starter motors and alternators. This was more complex than servicing a magneto, which seems to basically require replacement of the points. If there are any other things that require servicing – for instance, a rotor, it’s no doubt easier to start over and get a new one. But, if you don’t, the bits are also quite cheap. Servicing a starter motor, (which isn’t often done now, because they’re throwaway parts) requires parts that tally to about $6, for brushes and bearings. If the armature is shorted out, then you start again, a bit of ‘sanding the gaps’ and some reassembly and you’re good to go. It takes less than half an hour, once you know what you’re doing. Overhauling a starter motor also involves checking (and fixing) the solenoid if damaged – something magnetos don’t have. Indeed, the trickiest part of the magneto servicing would be setting the timing again, which has the potential for quite the cock up.

Given how simple they are, I’m unsure why it costs somewhere around $700 – $1000 to service a magneto in Australia, and I can only assume it is due to insurance and regulation. There is some degree of qualification (you put one together in front of an examiner I think) and no doubt this costs money. But the rest must be insurance – in case it is found that your faulty magneto caused an air accident, which, by the way, is unlikely, given there are two of them. That’s not to say that you couldn’t catastrophically bugger things up (this is my particular area of expertise). A faulty magneto, firing at the wrong time, perhaps at the wrong pressure (altitude) could feasibly cause severe engine damage (radical knock!) but this would have to be rare I would have thought.

The other thing that is surprising is that there are other technologies that are gradually coming on line that supercede the 130 year old technology currently in use, but they’re still regarded with suspicion. Solid state magneto ignition systems have only been around and in wide spread use since the mid 70s so one might understand the recalcitrance of aircraft manufacturers.

In the spirit of the season, thinking hard about my career choices in life. I have spent the better part of my adult life engaged in interesting but increasingly futile prognostications about The Human Pickle. Since the pandemic, I’ve come to realise that the well of human folly contains fathomless depths, and exposure to such idiocy is hormetic – fun for a bit but rapidly toxic.

This is the kind of rumination that naturally needs to fantasising about the diagnosis and repair of magnetos.

School bullshit

My kid went to our local public school. We live in a regional area, and when she started school, a good number of years ago, this place was quite a bit poorer than it is now. Gentrification, like lots of coastal Australia, is on the razzle.

That’s not to say our local school community was desperately poor, or particularly rough. Our neighbours still left their doors unlocked a lot, and although there was a burgeoning meth appreciation society, it wasn’t dire. So, off to school we went.

And that was when the violence started. My kid got bashed, every, single day . Some days she was just kicked or spat on, others she was knocked unconscious, requiring a 3 hour ambulance trip to the paediatric hospital. (That was her last day at the school). She also experienced sexual assault, from another 6 year old. She lost teeth, but also her sense of self. She could not understand why it was OK for kids to hit her, but not for her to hit anyone. ‘I guess I deserve it’ she told me once, through tears.

This is the logical conclusion for many kids who are bullied. The principal told me she was ‘quirky’, the implication being that she had it coming. It wasn’t just my kid either. Others were bashed, stabbed (rarely) and bitten (frequently). There was a special classroom for the especially violent kids, with bars on the windows and no sharp or heavy objects. This is a primary school. Many of these kids were, however, allowed ‘out’ of their enclosure during breaks, to hit and bite the other kids. One memorable child liked to pick up rocks about the size of a 2 litre bottle of milk, out of the garden, climb the tree and then drop them on the kids walking below.

To be clear, most children weren’t like this, but a few were, and if you happened to be the target (there seemed to be about 5 targets in every year), then you would cop it. One parent was attempting to get the NSW department of education to pay for her child’s physical therapy after he lost an eye during a particularly savage beating.

I was not aware how bad things were, until I pulled my kid out of school, and she felt she could tell me what was happening to her, in full. She was too scared to ‘narc’. I am ashamed to say that I let my kid stay at that school for a year and a half. Thankfully, the other local public school let her in, and although still bullied, she did not experience any more violence.

It would be easy for me to say that this was simply a better school, and it was. The principal was committed to her staff, and the school worked well. The teachers were happy, liked working with each other, and generally, things worked smoothly. The previous school was characterised by bullying, and the principal disregarded female teachers’ concerns in particular.

The fish rots from the head, as they say, but was this just a case of bad management? I don’t think so. The first school serviced a much poorer school population. There was a much higher number of kids with social and behavioural problems. 40% of the pupils’ caregivers were grandparents, not parents. A stressed, harassed and underfunded school environment is the perfect medium for growing lateral violence and workplace bullying. Every P&C meeting was completely dominated by discussions about violence, and how to manage difficult students. At the second school, every meeting was dominated by endless discussions about why the canteen wasn’t breaking even.

So, when it came to attending high school, we had two options – the online, ‘Aurora college’ (a selective school for regional kids, where my kid would sit in one room with about 10 others kids, and look at a computer all day, only leaving for lunch and recess, where these ‘nerds’ are relentlessly bullied, including physical violence. Or, I could send her to one of the two local private schools.

I chose to send her to the private school. And I’m not alone. Our local public high school is rapidly emptying, as its problems become more entrenched. People often say things like, ‘Oh it’s a shame when the good students leave because the poor students don’t have the company, help and inspiration of the good students’. This criticism is like lamenting the lack of oat milk in Goulburn SuperMax.

Not wanting to be bashed every single day is positioned as a boutique lifestyle choice.

I said to my kid’s previous principal,

‘If I had a boyfriend who bashed my child badly enough to knock out her teeth, or send her to hospital, I would be complicit in a crime. And yet, somehow everyone thinks it’s acceptable when it happens within the bounds of these four chain link fences?’

The reason that our two closest local public schools are losing students to the private schools isn’t because people are getting richer, or because they’re choosing a wholesome religious education, or because they’re snobs who think their child will ‘grow up with the right connections’ (the last one is particularly laughable – the kids all know each other here anyway). The majority send their children for two reasons; safety, and the ability to have a teacher in the classroom.

Until a few years ago, our local public high school had a program where violent students attended school ‘off campus’, at a facility about 2km from the main high school. This worked – these kids had a small gym, a teacher who was particularly good at dealing with them, and some tailored support – including lunch. It kept the rest of the high school population safe. And we’re talking about 500 kids (on the main campus), so it’s not like it’s a small number.

This program was cut, presumably due to inadequate funding. Now, I am told that the school goes into lockdown often, sometimes several times a week.

The second is staff – some kids go an entire year without a teacher. Maths, for instance, is something that actually requires a teacher, as many parents, even relatively well educated parents, don’t have knowledge of higher level maths. So, there are entire cohorts of children who just simply miss out on a maths education. There is so much angst about how to get regional students into university, but seemingly no recognition of the fact that these kids are emerging from regional high schools with a year 5 education.

There is so much prognosticating about education – how to improve scores etc. But the biggest, most obvious thing is the violence. If a student is constantly told that it’s OK for them to be beaten, they quickly learn that this is their self worth. And everything follows on from there. Everything.

Every time a school prioritises the rights of the abuser over the victim they send a clear message to both parties. It is the ultimate ‘teachable moment’.

Yes, there are other differences between the private and public school, but again, these mostly flow from the violence. The public high school, for instance, has no functioning doors on any of the toilets now, because they are constantly smashed, so there’s no point in repairing them. There are no plants in any of the gardens because caretaking staff spend all their time (and more) fixing the damage from violent students. There are limited facilities because they all get smashed.

Teachers leave because they are fearful of the violence, and know that teachers/staff cannot physically touch any students, so the students cannot be restrained if they attack someone. There are almost no volunteers to run all the usual things that happen at school, because older women (the majority of volunteers) are too scared.

And anyone who reads this and says, ‘Oh just expel the bad students’ doesn’t understand that this is not how it works. Students cannot be expelled. And, they shouldn’t be. But equally, they shouldn’t be in an environment where they can harm others. This is why the ‘off site’ school worked.

There are solutions to this stuff, but no one is remotely interested in them, they would rather resuscitate the endless culture wars about why people who send their kids to private schools must be rich wankers etc., etc., a conversation almost entirely furnished by those who have paid millions of dollars for a house that just so happens to be located in the zone of an excellent public school that they attend for free, in postcodes so exclusive they might as well be gated communities.