It is always nice to be reminded of the reason you undertake a challenge such as building an airplane, and today was one of those days. Even in the face of monotonous deburring, having my family around to help out not only took the edge off (deburring pun! Boom!) but continued to get them excited about the day we all get to fly together in it. My daughters ask questions about airplanes and aviation in general and Anne and I do our best to answer their questions. Not from a lack of knowledge about aviation, but sometimes the questions get a bit… odd.
The first step of course is taking apart the entire creation that I had spent hours forming and match drilling. It was a work of art, and will be again someday soon, but for now we must set out to deburr every little hole on that table. Both sides. This may be a good time to invite anyone reading this to come on over sometime and feel free to help me build one day! You are always welcome to help out!
Here is Anne using my dimpling table as a soft surface to set out deburring one of the elevator skins.
The next generation of aviators in the family! Molly knows her way around the deburring bit and is clearing out some of the holes in the elevator as well. I promise she actually looked at most of the holes when she was working… Most of them.
It wouldn’t be the family plane if the entire family didn’t chip in – so here’s Eleanor cleaning out a few holes as well. I’m pretty lucky to have such an awesome team taking care of all of these drill holes.
Sitting on the ground apparently got to her head – so just after she went goofy she got up and moved to the work bench and finished deburring up there. Overall, we got everything ready to go for another day of priming tomorrow. Anne leaves town for work for the week, so I want to make sure that I get all of the parts primed and ready to go so I have some more work to do while she’s gone.
Total time today = 2.5 hours
Total time empennage = 87.5 hours
Total time aircraft = 87.5 hours