Transportation/Space
Thoroughly updated with respect to modern tools and materials, this Boatbuilding Manual remains both a professional reference and the first book a building amateur should buy. This edition, like its predecessors, emphasizes traditional wood construction but also surveys plywood, wood-epoxy, fiberglass, steel, aluminum, and other boatbuilding methods. New to this edition are a chapter on modelmaking; tables of metric equivalents; an appendix on safety; an expanded source guide for fasteners, bronze hardware, wood, and other staples of boatbuilding; and an extensive annotated list of additional reading organized by topic.
This clear, concise guide contains all the essential information anyone is likely to need to build a seaworthy craft with only two hands and the most basic tools. Starting with an introduction to materials, Percy Blandford -- a onetime Associate of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and a designer specializing in small craft -- takes would-be boat-builders every step of the way, from choosing appropriate materials to sanding and applying the final coat of paint.
A simply worded text -- accompanied by the author's own clearly drawn diagrams and other illustrations -- covers Clinker, Carvel, and fiberglass construction; plywood boats; molded veneer hulls; internal work; rudders and tillers; spar and oar making; basic ropework; details for installing an inboard motor; and ventilation, gas, and water installations.
First published nearly a half century ago, Blandford's book remains an excellent guide for both beginning and veteran woodworkers.
A simply worded text -- accompanied by the author's own clearly drawn diagrams and other illustrations -- covers Clinker, Carvel, and fiberglass construction; plywood boats; molded veneer hulls; internal work; rudders and tillers; spar and oar making; basic ropework; details for installing an inboard motor; and ventilation, gas, and water installations.
First published nearly a half century ago, Blandford's book remains an excellent guide for both beginning and veteran woodworkers.
Two hundred days orbiting Earth on the International Space Station. Five years working and training with the aerospace community across the world. A lifetime of choices leading to the stars. These are the components of Samantha Cristoforetti's dream, a dream she invites us to share in this intimate account of an astronaut's journey to space. She views the triumphs and disappointments of that journey with a poet's eye and a philosopher's mind--and an engineer's gift for detail that brings each experience into sharp focus.
With Cristoforetti as our guide, we're called to become "apprentice astronauts" and experience the world anew through the visor of a space suit's helmet. Bonding with crew members to tackle challenges as a team, lifting off from the launchpad in a roar of engines, discovering the strange wonders of weightlessness, seeing Earth with a fresh perspective after a bittersweet return to solid ground . . . all these moments and more reveal what it really takes to escape our planet's gravity in pursuit of a goal.
With Cristoforetti as our guide, we're called to become "apprentice astronauts" and experience the world anew through the visor of a space suit's helmet. Bonding with crew members to tackle challenges as a team, lifting off from the launchpad in a roar of engines, discovering the strange wonders of weightlessness, seeing Earth with a fresh perspective after a bittersweet return to solid ground . . . all these moments and more reveal what it really takes to escape our planet's gravity in pursuit of a goal.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Exhilarating." --New York Times Book Review "Riveting." --People "Keith O'Brien has brought these women--mostly long-hidden and forgotten--back into the light where they belong. And he's done it with grace, sensitivity and a cinematic eye for detail that makes Fly Girls both exhilarating and heartbreaking." --USA Today The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s -- and won Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. Thousands of fans flocked to multi-day events, and cities vied with one another to host them. The pilots themselves were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. Well, the men were hailed. Female pilots were more often ridiculed than praised for what the press portrayed as silly efforts to horn in on a manly, and deadly, pursuit. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of women banded together to break the original glass ceiling: the entrenched prejudice that conspired to keep them out of the sky. O'Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high-school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcee; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue-blood family's expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to race against the men -- and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all. Like Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, Fly Girls celebrates a little-known slice of history in which tenacious, trail-blazing women braved all obstacles to achieve greatness.
This book is about learning to sail. It follows the techniques perfected at the world-famous Annapolis Sailing School, where thousands of people just like you have learned to take tiller in hand and harness the wind. You'll learn your way around a boat--what its parts are called, what they do, and how to use them to ride the wind wherever you want to go.
Read this book, spend some time on a boat, and practice your new skills, and pretty soon you'll be a sailor, one of a select group of people who think there's nothing finer than hiking out to windward in a close-hauled dinghy--racing against friends or a neighboring sailing club, or alone and just for the fun of it.