Today was the first decently warm day we’ve had since Thanksgiving, so I decided it was time to knock out an outdoor task primarily for my Long-EZ buddy, Guy Williams. As I noted, the right main gear strut on his Long-EZ is having some gear issues as a result of heat induced at some point by the brakes.  In essence, the camber of both wheels have the tops both leaning towards the left, when they both should have the wheel tops more outboard than the bottom of the wheels.  Yep, something is askew!

I ran down to Lowe’s hardware and bought a sheet of 3/4″ plywood (buried in pic below) to construct the wing lift jacks, and also picked up the first round of lumber for constructing the in-shop post cure heat room/paint booth.

Back home I unloaded all the other stuff by quickly crossloading it to my nearby utility trailer.

With my 3/4″ sheet of plywood now unburdened by what had been (pic 1), I cut the sheet into 3 pieces: two for the jack uprights and the smaller piece for the jack bases (pic 2).

There are four (4) uprights to each lift jack, which I cut out of each of the 2 larger 3/4″ plywood pieces on the table saw.

With the remaining piece of 3/4″ plywood, I cut 2 bottom bases out of it: about 20″ x 20″ (pic 1), and then 2 smaller top cap pieces 8.5″ x 9″ (pic 2).

I then dug through my scrap pile under the carport to grab two 4x4s and cut those at ~30″ long (pic 1).  I then made all the initial 5″ wide x 12″ high notches in the uprights (upside down in pic 2).

I then marked an angled line on each upright and cut each one with my Skil saw.

Here we have the angled cut lines complete for one set of uprights, with the next set getting cut next.

A couple of hours later, and Voila!  A set of 2 fully functioning and operational wing lift jacks!

I of course tested the height using my Long-EZ as the test subject.  Looks like these dogs will hunt!

I spoke with Guy and we plan on doing a live ops check with these wing lift jacks in a couple days.

I’ll note one other topic that I was remiss in communicating in my last post: a squirrel war report.  Apparently, with the weather having gotten quite cold, the squirrels did another full frontal assault in trying to nest in my shop.  Well, when I dismantled their latest rounds of nest-building they went ballistic!  The last couple of days I’ve walked into downed lights, entire light banks out of commission, speaker wires cut, CAT-5 cables cut, Bluetooth puck cables cut, Wi-Fi router power cable destroyed, etc.  I mean they really wanted some payback for their destroyed nests.

Well, after Day 2 of their rampage I had enough.  I spent over $50 on mothballs and poison rodent food and stuffed the mothball packs into their ingress and egress points, as well as in the 3 nest areas that I know of.  It took me well over an hour to get the lights back online… each day.  The other stuff is still inop, but a couple of days later now and I’ve seen zero signs of the squirrels.

So, lesson learned… keep deploying fresh mothballs every so often to keep those sadistic little bastards out of the shop!