hey guys! lets play a little game! my drifter when I got it has some funny little tabs on the stay wires. CAN YOU GUESS WHAT THEY'RE FOR???

They are small bits of rubber wrapped around the lower outer wires, not quite in the middle of the span but the same distance out on both sides.

now they where installed as part of a mount for something by the CSIRO of which is the Australian Governments national science agency as part of an experiment.

The experiment had nothing to do with aviation so don't be thinking along the lines of aerodynamics or anything.

and if you think its obvious, believe me your wrong!

Vibration or noise??
Much like the dampeners on a compound bow.

Antennae mounts for wildlife tracking?

Canister mounts for seeding clouds for weather generation? (Or government mind control of the population! Tin foil hats required...)

Flying wire hard points for air dropping rabid Tasmanian Devils onto unruly local watering hole parties?

Something to do with shrimp on the barbie?

Or hard points for dropping Seppos into the GBFR that ask about shrimp on the barbie?

I think it has something to do with counting kangaroos.

We used grids mounted on the strut to count elk from the air at one point. I saw an article about using Drifters in Africa for counts.

Perhaps?

attachment point for ski bungees?

Wombat detectors?

Mike got it straight up! Wow that was much quicker than I thought!!!

In 2010 a few fellas from the CSIRO managed to get a $200 000 grant to investigate a low cost method of cloud seeding. Cloud seeding is in essence making it rain to cut a long story short.

it is done successfully in a few places around the world, however most successfully in Tasmania. Though down there It is done with big twin engined aircraft with lots of very expensive equipment and has a about a 30 percent success rate.

these fellas thought it could be done with an ultralight, a couple of bits of 100 mm storm water pipe, and some aluminium foil from coles (always good to know where your tax payer dollars go huh?)

they approached my good Wayne Fisher at the time and offered him a ridiculous amount of money, to have what in his eyes would be a big laugh. so of course he accepted. The only thing was he didnt want to use his aeroplane incase something went wrong, so they offered him $10 000 dollars to put toward another aircraft. It just so happened to be perfect timing as he had another plane stashed in the big of his hanger of which he had been ferrying for a fella, but was told not to arrive at his destination as a nasty case of aviation induced divorce syndrome was unfolding and the wife didn't know about that one yet! he quickly called the fella up and said Ill give you 10 grand cash for the plane, right now, then your wife doesn't have to know nor can she get her hands on it........................6 months later I named that plane Lil' Popsy

anyway back to the story at hand there method was to strategically place the $2.50 worth of PVC pipe stuffed with $3 worth of foil on the the stay wires, and then for Wayne to go fly up under a nice grey could and fly in a tight circular motion right below cloud base. The air going through the pipes will some how cause the water in the cloud to begin to rain. while this was going on a team of researchers where sitting back at the Weather bearu monitoring the effects.

Amazingly it worked! Wayne got completely saturated! sadly however that was about it...it didn't produce enough water for anything to make it even close to the ground. Not surprisingly nothing more happened with the research other than a paper was written up explaining how to have the worlds most expensive shower at 4000 feet.

DrifterDriver wrote:Mike got it straight up! Wow that was much quicker than I thought!!!

Woohoo!! Do I get a cookie?

Yeah no worries mate, its sitting in my kitchen cuboard if you want to swing by and grab it next time your in the area

And here I thought they were notches to put your arrows in. I figured the main parts of the system were removed but when it was fully operational you could shoot rabbits forward and backward. Now I find out it was for work not play, bloody boring.