I started off today already a little behind the power curve build-wise since I had to run downtown to knock out a couple of errands.  While downtown I stopped by one of my favorite coffee joints for a cup of java while I planned my day out.

Back home, I put the finishing touches on the latest blog post and uploaded that.  I had just finished printing out the day’s shop task list when I got a call from Guy William’s (local canardian), asking me if I wanted to go flying?  Are you kidding me?!  As much as I want to get my bird in the air, I figure it would be good to get a motivational hop in his Long-EZ (classic rationalization), given that I’ve done my fair share of work on it over the past number of months.

I got to Guy’s hangar at the airport about 45 minutes later, where he already had his Long-EZ pulled out and pre-flighted.  I hopped in, buckled up and grabbed this pic just prior to us firing up and taxiing out for the flight.

I’ll note that today was just about a perfect flying day.  We took off and immediately could see North Carolina’s beautiful Chrystal Coast (Outer Banks) all around us.

Once leveled out, we could see the airport down below (KMRH) that we just departed.

We headed toward the lighthouse on Point Lookout and after a few tight turns over the Atlantic coastline, I took over flying and went out just a bit beyond the point out over the Atlantic before turning back around and flying up the beach a bit.

We did a few more turns, and since Guy has a rear seat throttle, we even did a number of stalls, which is a first for me in the Long-EZ.

Overall, a super great experience and a lot of fun! (Thanks Guy!!!) and more importantly, all the work we did on his plane proved to be up to the challenge of real world ops.

Of course no good deed (or goofing off flying!) goes unpunished, so why should today be any different??  On the way home from the airport I discovered a giant screw in my right front tire.  The good news is I was just a couple of miles from where I bought the tires, and since I have an anything goes warranty, I pulled in and had them fix it.  The bad news is that it took another good 1.5 hour more chunk out of my day.

Ok, back in the shop I did a bit of sanding on the low spot fills I did on the D-deck left side 10 O’ clock position where it met the top cowling (pic 1), and the same for the right side at the 2 O ‘clock position (pic 2).  I also initially sanded the top cowl front edge centerline where it met the D-deck.  It was getting later in the evening so I punted the final sanding until tomorrow as to not screw anything up.

I also did the final prep on the elevator BOTTOM surfaces before doing a final epoxy wipe on each one of those.  The next step is to wet sand these epoxy-wiped elevators, at which point they’ll be ready for primer.

Although I haven’t shown it, over the past week whenever I’ve had a bit of extra epoxy in my cup, I’ve been adding a couple of stepped plies of BID at a time (4 plies total) to fill in a low spot on the aft left wheel pant where it meets the front pant… about even with the micro on the front pant seam and in a curve aft towards the gear leg pant apron.  For whatever reason I had a really low spot here, so I filled it with a bit of glass before adding a layer of micro.  I added glass since I wanted to minimize any cracking of what would have been a fairly thick layer of micro.

I double checked the thickness of my added BID plies, and then remounted the aft pant half and after taping up the intersecting edges of the gear leg apron and the front pant half, I slathered on a good layer of micro.  I also hit the top forward area of the front wheel pant as well since there was a slight depression down the centerline.

Of course I didn’t get nearly what I had planned to done in the shop, but I did get a little bit knocked out.  And a day out flying is always good stuff!