Microwave blues

I have a microwave that I love dearly.  It's a Panasonic combination microwave that does the best baked potatoes on its special pre-programmed program in under 13 mins.  Unfortunately yesterday appears to have been its last curry.  I wondered why my dish didn't boil over in 30 mins of microwaving and felt it to be somewhat suspicious.  But today I microwaved our soups (2x = 585mL) & in 9 minutes total no warmth was felt.  RIP wonderful microwave.  You've spared me the cost of taking you to Oz.  And with the number of months it's been my only cooking source I can't really complain.

While Julian's away....

Today Julian went to Gary's to tune something on the engine, so i got half a day to myself to do.... What do I normally do if I've got time to myself?????  So I ended up reading through the instruction booklets to come to the conculsion that there was nothing I could do that didn't involve a) cutting holes Julian had already told me not to do without help or b) filing stuff down (bad for my fibreglass allergy).  So I made a mud cake....

By the end of the day the plane looked like this...

Spiders???

One morning a few weeks back I got up to find little pieces of spider silk over everything, which really freaked me out.  So I checked inside the sleeves, legs and pockets of my overalls before putting them on, shuddered a little while walking through the kitchen area and tried to stay zen about it.  These days I'm really not zen, because I've realised that they're actually short pieces of glass fibre, that are presumably floating around the entire warehouse all the time & generally getting in everything.  Yuck.

Anyway today we did some good work after a slow start.  I started on the wings, Julian did a large amount of putting the rudder hinges on, and tomorrow he and Gary are going to somehow tune the engine before putting it on the plane.  All good.  I had fun screwing little brass fittings into little steel fittings and off again.  The usual.

Backdating and other little tricks

as you will have probably suspected, I've been liberally back-dating my posts in order to have the date match up with the events described.  So this is my first real time post!  (Well now I've corrected the date and time to be English and not Australian I suppose it isn't real time anymore!)  I didn't do much at all today: I was feeling pretty ill. So the boys did a sterling job of fibreglassing the tail of the plane (which took all day) and I managed to drag myself out in time to film Julian doing the last little bits of smoothing the cloth down and then putting the bubble wrap 'tent' over the tail of the plane.  About half an hour later we had a moment of intense concern as the smell of burning epoxy spread out in the warehouse, but luckily this appears to have just been ground off particles that have fallen on the coils of the radiator.  We're slowly accumulating a nasty silt of white dust over just about everything in the warehouse.  I got really worried a couple of weeks ago that we had a spider plague, as there were fine pieces of spider silk over everything, but no it was just fiberglass strands.  If I were to work much more with fiberglass I would get myself something looking a bit like a bee keepers suit to keep the stuff away from me.

Can't believe we're here again already!

After a hectic weekend of catching up with friends, post and work, we're back in Norfolk again.  This time we brought Chris with us.  But forgot to bring Julian's laptop, hence no photos to prove his having been here.  (The software for the time-lapse photography is only on his computer and my web connection is too slow to do anything like download it here).  So after a lot of fussing around, we took the wings out of their crate and rearranged the warehouse a bit, we finally got the tail fin on straight.  Gary came around to check taht we were doing it right.  A big help since we hadn't noticed that the bolts were loose on the jig that we use as a reference to make sure that the tail fin is perperdicular to the roof of the plane so it wasn't measuring correctly.  At all.  Then Chris and Julian spent a lot of the evening flocking both tail parts into place and then screwing them in place.

In the interim I made a duck wing red curry, as I could see that we weren't going to be finished in time to go out to a pub.  I partnered it with a Kuenstler 2003 Spaetlese riesling from the Rheingau in Germany, which was really quite delicious - 8% alcohol and so fruit laden with good acid, very intense.  2003 was a very hot year in Europe, which made for good wines in cooler areas like Germany, but was less favourable for hotter places like Sicily.

Friday morning

A hectic clean and vacuum of the factory unit, placing the last few items needed in London in the car, then a trip to the gym to go for a swim in public hours (7-9am), then home to London via the market so that we could pick up a few pheasants and duck wings.  Ah the joys of rural life!

1 sleep to go!

Tomorrow it's back to London, so was important to get the tail fin and horizontal stabiliser (tail too)  ready so that they can be fibreglassed into place on Monday.  This meant heaps of complex negotiations of placing to make sure the tail is perpendicular to the body, then a whole heap of drilling holes for self tapping screws so that we actually put the tail in the designated angle and position.  And of course the endless fun of pulling mousing lines through the tail with the radio cable (amongst others) attached, with of course the obilgatory putting the wrong size tube through, routing the cables the wrong way, tugging too hard on the cable and pulling it back into the body of the plane so that we have to completely remove it from the plane's body and pull it back through.  The joy.  Amazing how time flies though!

Exxxxpandafoam

is truly amazing stuff.  Quite incredible.  Julian spend a lot of time installing the rear seat just right, treating it with the heat gun to mould the fibreglass to the right shape to fit the plane, drilling dozens of holes so that it could be held securely in place while the epoxy dries, removing them, fibreglassing the join etc., and then along came the new tin of expanda foam.  It smells funny.  It looks funny.  You put a bit in, watch it expand, put a bit more in, watch it expand, and finally you've used up the entire tin 'oh no it's not enough I'll have to go buy some more!' then you check on it an hour later to see the foam mushrooming out of the holes in the seat that had been drilled to put the foam in.  So you remove the mushrooms and keep doing so for the next 2 h.  The next morning the seat is all bulged up, so that anyone sitting on the rear seat feels like they're on a pop ball.  Oh oh.  So drilling of more holes to let more of the still wet foam bubble out.  Apparently the foam can stay wet for a good 10 years.  We just hope that our seat stays level.

And here is Julian taking out the self tapping screws that held the seat back in place whilst the epoxy was setting.

Other people's planes...

always look different to your own.  Today we went down to Denver airfield to have a look at Gary's to get a better understanding of what the trimmer would do and to nut out the thorny issues such as 'did they really want me to mount the seat belt attachments there?'  Anyway the latter question was meant to apply to the rear seat belt attachments, but I discovered that the front seat belt mounts go behind the seat, ahhhh.  Oh well it was a quick repair.  I have a real aversion to redoing any job, but I'm discovering that although it takes 20 mins to do a job the first time, it really only takes 2 minutes to redo it.

Epoxy resin...

will only go hard if you put hardener in it.  Our fuel tank didn't have hardener mixed in the epoxy affixing its fittings, which meant that they loosened very easily.  Luckily we noticed it now & not in the air, as all the fuel could have leaked out!  Anyway that has put the installation of the fuel line a bit behind schedule, as we wait for a new one to be shipped from Oz.

I don't know where the days have gone...

It's Julian's birthday already.  The plane is looking more plane like, but I'm not sure where the last few days have gone.  Progress has been made, slowly, and we hope it's only another 4 weeks until it's ready to paint.

And back again in Norfolk

and being very careful to stay well away from any fibreglass cutting / sanding / epoxy fumes.  The plan is to see if I can be in the factory without getting an allergic reaction again.  This means that my tasks are a little more boring at the moment - I read through the manual, make cross marks where holes need to be drilled, find all the parts needed for each task and line them up on the bench.....  At least I can still cook.  So far triumphs of factory cooking have been oxtail stew in the rice cooker, which was hard work as you have to keep flicking the switch between cook & warm in order to keep the temperature at a simmer.  And mustard eggs (senf Eier), again a rice cooker effort - because the rice cooker gets very hot very quickly it's a good thing for making sauces like this mustard sauce.