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Date: 12-10-2019
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Number of Hours: 100.00
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Short Description: Painting and moving the project to airport
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Funny how a month, and many hours of work ago, I wrote, “I had everything to a nice top coat”. Now a month later, that is actually true. What was lacking (long with playing with door seals, was a top coat on the wings and tail feathers. Now that is actually done. I sprayed the last large group of components last Saturday. It turned out to be the best coat so far. Not perfect, but good enough for the temporary paint job I intended.
I rented a hanger on November 25th and moved the fuselage the next day. It was a big day rolling the fuselage out into the yard. It fit through my shop back door with the wheels brushing the door frame. I also had to build a temporary 12 x 16’ deck with a ramp as there is an 18” drop as you go out the door. The fuselage needed to make an immediate right 90-degree turn, which took a lot of back and forth to clear all of the obstacles. I welded up a tow bar from spare 4130 tubing I had on hand from my GP4 project. I also managed to drive a sharp scrap of aluminum into the front tire that I missed in all of my sweeping giving me a flat tire. So, now I have experience repairing a flat tire on the plane.
My son Tim and son’s friend (with 24-foot goose neck trailer) helped out making the move easy. Overall, the move went off without a single problem outside of the flat tire.
To bring things up to date, I have all of the parts excepting the wings at the airport. Those will move today. I have been purchasing and/or moving tools to the airport as I go along. Trying to build up the capability to get work done at the hanger. I have the stabilizer mounted and torqued and am mounting and rigging the elevators at the present time. Every trip to the hanger reinforces why I built this airplane at home. Every trip to work on the plane adds an hour of travel time plus the inefficiencies of unorganized tools and cold work space. It’s not even worth going unless I have a minimum 2-hour block of time. If I did the whole thing this way, it would probably have added two years to the project. It was r
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Deck and ramp to exit the shop
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Oitside for the first time
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On our way
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