October 29, 2006

This morning I got to the hangar earlier, because of the clocks going back an hour! I was expecting Keith to come by with his vast Lancair experience to help me out with glassing this thing up, so I spent some time prepping for when he arrived. I ran into Larry today too, and he asked me if I was available some time today to help him wire an Autopilot coupler into his plane, so I told him to let me get some lay ups done and I’d come over. I needed some long reach clamps so I ran out to Home Depot to see what they had, and grab some food.

Clayton showed up too, so we decided to get cracking and put some flox mixture in before Keith arrived. Clayton once had an incident where he got some loose flox in his eye. These days he’s a little more cautious!

We went ahead and put a layer of glass over the flox peanut butter and then went over to help out Larry. Keith should be here anytime too, so it should all work out perfect.

Here’s me doing some layup.

Here you can see where we have fibreglass over the flox peanut butter on one half and just the peanut butter on the other.

Well, the plan didn’t really work out. Keith came by while we were buried behind Larry’s instrument panel, so he left a note and we ended up missing him. Doh. We were over at Larry’s for about three hours, wiring in the coupler. We tested it, and to all our amazements, it worked!

So, we got back to the hangar and found the note from Keith. Sorry Keith, I probably should have called you. Well, once we were done with Larry, we came back to the WARM hangar (Larry’s hangar was freezing!) and carried on with the lay ups. The previous layers had set up pretty nicely too. Excellent. Here’s Clayton laying some glass.

Careful now!

Here it is, pretty much done. Of course we still have the rear bits to do where the clamps are, but that shouldn’t be too bad either. The fun starts when we break out the sandpaper. I hate sanding. Ugh.

I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the clamps. I thought they looked so out of proportion with the plane that it was funny. I had to laugh. Could I have found any bigger ones? This is America you know!