Everybody has fetishes. Me too. Not stilettos, despite the graphic (hey, you try searching for “bag of fetish” and see how many options Google Images gives you), but one fetish I’ll admit to is aircraft engines, especially the round reciprocating kind. I find them irresistibly sexy.
Aviators who’ve flown behind radials and had to wipe oil off their goggles afterward probably would not share my fetish. But though I’ve flown several types of piston- and jet-powered aircraft, I’ve never flown with a round engine, so to me radials still exude pre-jet set glamour. They have that China Clipper cachet. They are objects of mechanical lust.
My Flickr air-minded collection contains several aircraft engine photos. Pima Air & Space Museum, where I volunteer as a tour guide, has dozens on display: single-row 3-, 5-, 7-, and 9-cylinder radials; double-row 14- and 18-cylinder models; even a four-row monster with 28 cylinders, a veritable corncob of a powerplant once used to power Cold War behemoths like the B-36 strategic bomber. There are some sexy inline engines on display too.
Nearly all the museum’s display engines have had their exhaust manifolds removed. I never thought about that until yesterday, when I stumbled across an old Jacobs 7-cylinder radial, the kind once used to power Cessna Bobcats (Sky King used to fly a Bobcat on TV, if you’re old enough to remember that). The Jacobs, unlike the other engines on display, still has its exhaust manifold, which enshrouds and obscures the engine. If I wanted to put a radial piston engine on display, I’d probably remove the exhaust manifold too. It’s easier to appreciate the beauty of the engine — and certainly easier to visualize how it works — without all that extra crap in the way.
Some photos (click on the thumbnails to see ’em larger on Flickr):
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Well. Speaking of engines, I was in the garage this morning when Donna left for work. It took her three tries to start the Lincoln. I don’t like it. There’s another visit to the garage in our near future, but hey, it still beats a car payment.
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I read about Twitter’s @StealthMountain this morning. Some guy or girl searches Twitter for the phrase “sneak peak” and retweets the results. I laughed out loud. One of my personal peeves (not a fetish, but distantly related) has always been people who don’t know pique from peek or peak, so this morning I started a new Twitter account of my own, @fitofpeak:
It’s more of a tribute to @StealthMountain than anything else, and no doubt I’ll quickly lose interest, but for now watch out: the Pique Policeman is on the case!
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I’m coming up on seven years sober. I try not to brag about going straight. Some people make sobriety a fetish, and it’s tiresome. Good scotch was a fetish in my drinking days. Today it’s iced tea. I get restless if there’s not a full pitcher in the fridge. I have special iced tea containers and strainers. I buy only certain specialized brands of tea. Fresh lemons? They have become a sub-fetish.
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But I bet you want to know what my real fetishes are. The ones that count. The sexual ones. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine, deal?