Yesterday my wife told me that she always thought I was a good writer, so that’s compelling me to actually write something today.  I have a few blog posts rattling around in my head, but I haven’t really had the time to pull those together and put them to words.  Free time is rare, especially when you’re involved in a project.  My friend Jamie is only home about one week a month, so we try to make as much progress recovering his airplane wings as possible during that time  Usually that means working most evenings and on the weekend too.  The way this schedule works out usually only gives us two or three hour a day to work on the wings.  If we were able to work on these full time, we would have been done long ago, but I’ve grown fond of having a day job.

We did have one set back that wiped out a week’s worth of work, which to us meant we lost a month (It turns out, though, that we were waiting on some back ordered parts, so we really didn’t lose that much time).  The set back came as we were applying the final shrink to the fabric.  Our instruction manual is very clear about the temperature settings we needed to achieve.  Following the book, we put the spurs to it, and then things started to bend.  Bending is bad.  First, some of the ribs started looking like S’s.  Then the ribs on the trailing edge inboard of the ailerons buckled.  We had to cut the fabric to relieve the tension.  After some deliberation we cut all the fabric off of both wings, and started over.

In  retrospect, the setback was a great learning opportunity.  After consulting the manufacture and some seasoned pros, we learned that this is more of an art than a science (in other words, the book isn’t always correct).  The second time around we have been much more efficient, and I think the end result will be greatly improved.

This past weekend as we were working on the wings I started getting excited as the list of things yet to do seems much smaller than the list of things we’ve already done.  Yesterday we started putting on the gussets and inspection ring covers.  Next comes the finishing tapes, and soon we’ll start spraying on the various coatings and paint.

Here’s some of the latest pictures.   You can see the entire collection of photos over on Flickr.