Thorp Air Command - T18.net

Lee,
First, thanks for doing all the digital magic with the newsletters. I'm a relative newby to the Thorp. So, if I want to access the newsletters to find any comments that pertain to a particular subject, how would I do that? Is there a comprehensive index of subjects (e.g. "Wing ribs: NL15, pg 4; NL18 pg2, etc"), or maybe a section-by section breakdown that corresponds to the construction sequence or drawing numbers? Or, is there a way to download all the newsletters and search them cumulatively in Acrobat so I can find every reference to the word "trigear", "tri-gear", "nosewheel" etc.

There's obviously a lot of wisdom and timesaving tips in those info in those NL's, and that cumulative knowledge from lots of experienced folks is something that sets the T-18/S-18 apart. I doubt there are many new problems left to find, and there's no glory in being the hundredth builder to make the same mistake. I just want to figure out how I can find the gems that are in there when I need them.

Mark Waldron

Mark,
We have such an index in the old newsletters but they are pretty sketchy. That's why I loaded them electronically on the main site. You can type whatever search term you want in the search box and if that word appears in a NL you'll see it listed.

Note: You have to be a current MAS member and logged in for the search to work.

_________________
Lee Walton
Houston, TX
N51863,N118LW
KEFD

Lee,
Gotcha. The "search" box on the members-only portion of the web site (where the NLs are stored) doesn't search within the PDFs (right?). Do people download all the PDFs and then merge them into a single (huge) PDF file if they want to search all the NLs for a term? Otherwise, unless the builder knew which NLs have something of interest at the moment, each NL would each would have to be opened and searched individually every time. A single PDF will be a monster (and likely impractical to keep on the site as single thing), but it might be useful for each builder to make such a file.
Or maybe there's a much smarter way for me to be doing this. Probably!

Mark Waldron

Mark,
There is one single file located under members only downloads entitled "Thorp Newsletters Compilation Set", it is unfortunately not 100% complete.

The search tells you what NL to look in ... just like a Windows Explorer search or something of the like. I do not find it to be cumbersome at all considering we used to have to read through them by hand. The system is basically saying "Hey what you are looking for is in NLx, NLy, NLz, ... NLn" etc ...

_________________
Lee Walton
Houston, TX
N51863,N118LW
KEFD

Nl 122 has a list

Lee,
Thanks. I was looking in the wrong place (at http://thorpaircommand.com/index.php?page=members_only)

Bob,
Thanks for the lead to NL122. That's a good find and a good complement to the electronic search function.

Regards,

Mark