HomebuiltAirplanes is a cesspool of toxic masculinity, millennial haters, and misogynists. As the only girl there for 5 years who made 1,682 well thought out posts, I could write a scathing book about it here, but again, not topical nor germaine to this thread. Suffice it to say, in the five years I was there and since then, I have never once saw any one of them actually complete a plane nor one complete a plane project since I left.
The more success I had bringing home airplane projects as a scrappy little underdog (and very poor at the time buying projects nobody else would touch with a ten foot pole), the more warped jealousy and unfounded slander was hurled at me, when all I was doing was making aviation related posts and Show and Tell sharing my progress. That's literally why I went to the forum, to hang out with what I thought were birds of a feather, show them my airplane stuff, and look at theirs... exchange knowledge, ideas, and interesting finds from the internet.
For me, however, I finally lost my last taste entirely for the place after many years, when I posted how tickled I was at one point to have lucked into an expired BRS parachute. One of the merry little band of millenial haters chimed in with a taunt to the effect of "oh, look at me, I'm miss "queen" and miss "i"t with my own little parachute!"
I though, you know, a parachute is a life saving device, one of them saved the life of my grandfather, when he bailed out of a dodgy P-39. They're pretty hard to come by, even more so... free... expired or otherwise. These guys actually don't know anything about aviation, politically most of them are brainwashed, and any self appointed arm chair 2 cent they may offer may even be very dangerous. This place is not helping me at all to build an airplane or get flying; in fact, it's quite a distraction and is slowing me down.
Most of the guys on the forum are old farts who are completely computer illiterate, and don't even know how to fill out their profile page, or that they have one. Computers have been around since the 1940's, and have been widely acccessible since the 1980's. If these guys don't even know the fundamentals of how a computer or the internet works, which are safe machines and systems that stay on the ground, you sure don't want to trust their advice about machines that have to constantly be moving through air to counteract gravity which is a ceaseless unyielding force. I would not be surprise to find out a distrubingly high pecentage of them think Facebook and their smart phone *is* the internet.
Though there may be a cameraderi there founded upon deep seated and unfounded group prejudices and hatred of millenials, a hatred of RC quad copter drones, airplanes in general, and an affinity for bending metal, I would not call it a community. I once made the mistake of asking if anyone had an old played out $20 auto shutter welding helmet I could have, as I was doing a complete strip down to the bare metal and build back up again of a 20ft airplane trailer, to transport my grassroot project planes upon and pick up new ones. To me, having a legit flatbed trailer was the logical next big essential idem I needed to have.
Ohmigosh, bad mistake to ask for a beat up old welding helmet, the hatred came out, how dare you ask for any beat up old thing, you entitled and spoiled millenial, and why am I looking at pictures of a trailer anyway, this place is about building airplanes. Okay, how are you going to get your airplane to the airport, and how are you going to pick it up when you land off field. If you own an ultralight or are restoring them, a trailer is going to be an essential piece of kit.
While doing a complete clean of our shop, I ended up finding just such a helmet my dad had, a beat up $35 job from Harbor Freight, and I went on to complete my trailer, and used it to pick up airplane #3. Let me tell you, drilling several hundred holes in tower steel with a hand drill and your body weight on top of it was pretty brutal going.
By this point, I had met some really nice guys OUTSIDE the forums... guys that not only flew every day, but had several flyable airplanes in their stables, exactly the point where I wanted to be someday. When I told of my experiences on the forums, their universal reply was "I never go to those places". Not even to proudly show off a plane they had finished. They bought their parts, worked alone on their own alone quietly and without fan fare, knocked out their projects, and kept right on going, with no bother to "Show and Tell" or share at all.
They needed no validation, and I though, you know, all the things I've built on the farm from scratch, and all the things my dad built... we never bothered to go online and talk about it, or post about it. We knocked them out, admired our work and clever solution in some cases, and kept on going. And I thought, you know what, I'm trying to share here, and these guys.. I get outright hostility from half of them. If they set up a coffee table at Oshkosh as they did to meet and greet, I actually would not want to meet any of them.
I don't know if the site owner Jack Kraus is aware of any of the problems; I suspect so and he just doesn't care or is down with the disgusting state of affairs. Most of the admins he appointed have no business moderating a forum, and treat it as their own personal enclave, deleting or locking threads not for legitimate reasons (like for only removing robot spam), but simply because they dislike a person or a persons politics or point of view, and carry out personal vendettas and censorship to drive those they dislike off the forum. Jack Kraus is conspicuously absent - I suspect he just set up the forum software and left, leaving a couple of clowns in charge with no life that still live out of they mother's basement. If he had any sense he'd de-admin the lot of them and put someone with ethics and integrity in charge that actually had experience administrating and maintaining a censorship free public forum.
I leave you with this last bit of advice to remember, if you remember nothing else from this read. You can create forum posts to put in your 2 cents and feel smart about yourself, and you will get... forum posts. Or you can build airplane or better yet... flying robots.... and fly them... and you will get... airplanes and flyring robots... and be flying. The outcome of your time invesment is... seeminly obvious and yet brutal. Do you want forum posts, or do you want to fly?
The people that build and finish airplanes, fly, and fly a lot, do not hang out in airplane forums.
Happy Flying. You don't need any forum to do it. You would be well advised to leave such places, and instead stay focused and work directly without interruption on your projects directed byt he final outcome you want to achieve and bring into a finished state in reality. None of the aviation pioneers had a forum or used them, and all the guys I know that fly all the time - have nothing to do with them, period. Seems shocking, but once you start working on soemthing completely focused, you realize, it's true.. you have no time to hang out on a forum or take and upload pictures.
You can find pictures of my airplane projects, mytrailer build, quad copter equipment, and so forth.. on my website...
Flying in a straight line. up high, to a GPS arrow... sorry, but that's not flying.
That's driving a city bus with wings on it.
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Without Rules, there are Infinite Possibilities, and
Unlimited Freedom of Choice to Become Everything that is You.
Statism is the Disease. Anarchism is the Answer. ...
If a kid made a rule up on a playground, would you obey it?
That's all statism is, ntothing more, asshole kids making rules
and trying to force everyone else to conform and obey with violence.
Obey no strangers. Not obeying anybody or anything is the foundation of freedom.
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