Out of the LA area, I'll head northwest toward Half Moon Bay, CA (KHAF).
Depending upon the fog, maybe I'll land and get some lunch there. Next, I'll
head up to Petaluma, CA (O69)
to visit with Michael Antares, a long time mailing list member (9 years!)
and COZY MKIV builder. A few other folks will meet us there as well, including
Tim Andres (fly in with a spam can), Neil Friedman, Bruce Edwards,
and Paul Werner, who will fly in with his V.E.
Jack Wilhelmson woke me up at 6:15 AM CDT to ask when Jim and I were going to arrive to deal with the Nose Lift. Jim and I had decided (the night before) that it would be more efficient for Jim to fly the NL down to Jack alone while I worked on the layups in the nose. Kill two birds with one stone, and all that [actually, that's the wrong saying, but you get the idea]). I told Jack that Jim would be down by early afternoon, and I'd call him when Jim was off the ground. It would be a few hours before Jim could take off, due to weather on both ends.
After breakfast, we headed out to the airport and I finished up preparation for the layups. I cut all the needed fiberglass, planned all the steps, found all the tools/epoxy stuff I was going to need, and laid it all out on the wings. As Jim got his plane ready for departure, Nick Ugolini called and said that he was going to be on a business trip to Iowa on Monday (tomorrow) and would be passing directly over Crossville. He said he just HAPPENED to have a Nose-Lift that he could loan me until I got mine repaired. After a few phone calls between me, Nick, and Jack, (Nick and Jack live very close to one another) we worked out a plan for bringing equipment to retrofit, repair, or replace the Nose Lift via Nick on Monday. This saved Jim 5 hours of flying, and saved Jack from having to rush a repair job.
Once again, saved by great folks working hard to help out a fellow canardian in need. Neither Nick nor Jack ever hesitated in offering to help, and help big.
While sorting all that out, I managed to micro, flox, and glass the front of my plane back together in about 5 hours of layups. I used 4 BID bandaids on both the inside and outside of the NG-30's, 2 BID on the inside and outside of the fuselage bottom, and 2 BID/1UNI on the F-22 patches. I left the layups with a hair dryer set on very low to cure overnight - the inside temp of the nose will stabilize at about 120 F, so the epoxy will be completely cured by the morning.
Although the preparation and layups took longer than I expected when planning
with Steve Wright and Jim Sower (so what's new - has anyone EVER had a layup
take LESS time than they thought it would?), it actually wasn't so bad - a total
of about 10 hours of work to put the nose back together again, and the
only cosmetic damage is on the bottom around the strut recess.
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