Ariel 1930 Pojects

[brenton.roy]

Really! Not something more spectacular than that!
Thanks Eero.

[Eero.Korhonen]

You are welcome, Brenton.

[andrew.koens]

I, too would like to know if these are still available.

[keith.hodgenia]

Let this man have whatever he wants, he has a gun!

[andrew.koens]

That's no ordinary gun! That's a WWI vintage Lewis machine gun I found in a museum/junkyard near Rabaul. What it was doing there is beyond me. Someday I'll get around to coming up with a more appropriate avatar...

[brenton.roy]

You've certainly got the croc hunter look going there Andy!
I'm sure you will have some great PNG stories..
Re the Lewis gun, i think there was a small military situation there about 70 years ago?

[andrew.koens]

Well yeah, but that was covered by the dozens of Browning .50's and .30's and dozens of Japanese 20mm, 7.7mm. etc. that were in the same pile with the Lewis gun. The Lewis gun seemed out of place, though I suppose some of them were still being used by WWII. It wasn't as out of place as the 2 muzzle loading cannons that were also there, though.

By now you should be figuring out that Ariels aren't the ONLY antique machines that interest me.

[brenton.roy]

I guess rust must be a big problem?
In parts of my state, the rainfall is under 10" pa. Parts of PNG get 10 metres..
Everything must be always wet.

[andrew.koens]

Yeah. we do get a lot of rain, but surprisingly rust isn't so bad. Not sure why. We do get a lot of mold growing on things--my old Land Rover always seems to have mold growing on the edges of the windows, and my wife's early '80's Mits Galant has some kind of a plant growing out of the driver's door that we've never bothered to uproot.

I'm in the highlands, so maybe that's part of the reason why I don't see more rust. Along the coast things rust very quickly, I think mainly from the salt breeze and fog. In the place where I was holding that Lewis gun, there was a Harley 74" flathead and ALL of its tins were rusted away, except the oil tank, and even it had rust holes in the bottom. There was nothing at all left of the fuel tanks and only traces of the mudguards remained. There were also a couple of Japanese Rikuos (more or less copies of HD 45's) and they were very, very bad. It looks as though somebody must have been using them to keep another one going for a while, but there was nothing left of them but pieces of the engines and very rusty frames/front ends.

Read an article in a magazine some time ago about an Aussie who discovered a pre-war NSU in Madang that had been sitting at a Catholic mission since the war--it actually looked halfway decent, but I guess it was stored indoors.

Hermann, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hijack this thread. I really do want to know if you still have those Ariels or not.