Darwin ARB and Long Ranger Tanks

Cozzie!! Lucky you didn't have a fowl smell with that noise!!! :)) Michael

You gotta watch out for little wasps up here, they will build a mud nest up the A/c drain pipe , next thing you notice is water on the floor when it over-flows, easy fixed by stuffing a piece of nylon fly wire 1/4 inch up the pipe.
So could it have a nest in the breather .

.

How a wasp can ground an aircraft.

Interesting story about mud wasp nests in Dr Clyde Fenton’s book. I read this many years ago, and has stuck in my mind ever since.
He made a number of power out force landings in the NT during his time here but was unable to find the cause of the engine shut down, apart from it being caused by fuel shortage, even though the aircraft had fuel in the tank. He was flying in a Tiger Moth and they gravity feed fuel to the engine from a tank in the upper wing.
Eventually he noted that the engine only starved for fuel after he had flown through moisture or rain. This stranded (Grounded) him on a number of occasions. Further investigation located a mud wasp nest in the breather hole inside the fuel cap. When it was dry, it allowed enough airflow through to allow the tank to gravity feed to the engine, but when it got moist, airflow through the mud ceased, and caused a vacuum in the tank that prevented the fuel flow and shut down the engine.

Again, from memory and reading BASI Crash comics and historical aviation books, there has also been similar circumstances where aircraft in the tropics have been grounded or crashed by these pesky wasps building their nests in the pitot tubes.

I have used this technique to shut down pesky noisy generators in the past. Lick to moisten a tiny piece of cigarette paper about ½ the size of your little fingernail, and put it over the breather hole in the generators fuel cap. Within 10 minutes or so the engine will “starve” of fuel and shut down. Once shut down the paper quickly dries off and blows away or falls off, leaving no trace.