Saturday 26 June 2010

Your gonna need a BIGGER drill


After a day of small disappoints, missing out on an IMC lesson as no instructor was booked and as a result missing a road trip to Aero Expo after missing out on flying down yesterday as Victor Alpha is still grounded I decided to do something positive and watch the F1 Qualifying from Valencia and then head out side for 5 hours working on the build.

It felt good to get the rivet gun back in my hand after spending a fair amount of time working out that the wing spar on my bench was actually the left wing spar and not the right one!! The only way I could turn the spar the make it fit the garage best was to walk the spar out on to the main road and walk it back in the other way - I suspect the people who live nearby think I'm a bit mad. I also managed to store the wing skins in a way that frees up a lot of space in the garage - Amazing what you can achieve with a roll of gaffa tape.

One of the scariest things I've done so far was drilling and taping the wing tie downs as I've not done anything like this since school so the pressure was on to get it right first time as the spar is no doubt an expensive part and I took some friends advice about using cutting fluid to make the tools work better. I also added the additional rivets to the spar as called out in vans plans and put JC5A on all of the pop rivets as I heard a tale of a £150,000 80% kit Spitfire that has corrosion on a lot of the rivets so don't want to take any chances with my aeroplane.

Sunday is predicted to be the hottest day of the year so far and I aim to put in some more time on my build in between the Grand Prix and England playing Germany in the World Cup. So far this week done almost 15 hours on the build so can't complain with that level of progress.