Yes, more than one.
…the important thing to understand about the compressor section of a turbine engine is that it is an affront to god; it does its job not because it wants to work, but because engineers much smarter than me have somehow tricked it into working.
“Ferret people, we are a lot,” said Michele Paulhus, who drove her ferrets from Massachusetts to the show in Columbus, Ohio. “You kind of have to be because they are freakish little animals.”
“But I don’t think we’re as bad as the reptile people,” said her friend Skyla Fay.
“Raising a ferret is like raising a 2-year-old or a teenager,” said Scarlett Gray-Saling, who owns 85 of them. “The only difference is it’s legal to lock ferrets in a cage.”
Wait, wait. It’s not legal to lock a 2-year-old or a teenager in a cage? Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?
This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2026 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Bagatelle, Mammals, Planes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I spent over 35 years making the alloys that go into making fan blades for the hot section of jet engines and ground based turbines. They are called Superalloys, and their purpose is to maintain their integrity as close to the melting point of the alloy as they can, since running hot is a part of efficiency.
One name for this kind of alloy is Single Crystal, as in Single Xtal 1, Single Crystal 4, etc. As the names implies, the casting is made of one crystal, so there are no shear planes for the part to fail at.
The man who developed this kind of alloy is from England, but is now a U.S. Citizen. He hit upon the idea while in the bath tub, or so he says. The secret to getting the alloy to be a single crystal is both the chemistry of the alloy and the method of casting the part, using a gate and riser system that swirls the alloy into the mold. We would get the scrap from this back and it looks like a corkscrew when solidified.
And you are right, some of the people who make these things are VERY intelligent. Metallurgists from Rolls-Royce and Pratt Whitney sometimes came to watch our processes, while working with our man, to finally get things right. I operated this kind of furnace for many years, which melted the alloy under very high vacuum.
I was one of two operators who ran the first heat that was sold at something like 10 million dollars. This was 15-20 years ago, so there is no doubt that these alloys are a very huge money maker for my former employer.