Monday January 14, 2008
Monday January 14, 2008 So this weekend was one of those builder's moments as far as building my Velocity. I bolted the wings (such as they are) onto the center section spar.
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---------------------------------------------- Here I am sitting in the fuselage making airplane noises and wishing I was a lot further along on this project. I've had to do a lot of moving of things around to get the plane to fit. At this point the wings don't have the winglets installed. They won't actually fit in the space I have. My plan is to cut a hole in the roof and have the winglets stick out thru the roof. I'm going to make some sort of temporary structure on the roof to keep the rain outand when the project is complete I'll repair the roof. The first question people ask is how will you get the plane down? The answer is that the wings will be unbolted and brought down separately.
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Here is another view looking up from the first floor. It gives a much better view of how big this thing is.
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One of the recent projects was to hang plastic strips to help enclose the second floor so I don't have to heat/cool the entire hangar. This has made a substantial improvement in my heating costs. Looks like the plastic will pay itself off the first winter. You can see the nose of the fuselage protruding thru the plastic strips. Hopefully when I get things a little more rearranged and the wings get trimmed to the actual length I'll be able to rotate the plane slightly and keep it within the plastic. For the exceptionally curious the white thing on the first floor just in front of the Tiger is a mirror grinding/polishing machine. I've have plans to grind/polish a 24 inch telescope mirror at some point. To this stage I've just been trying to learn the machine on an 8 inch mirror. On the Velocity the gap you see on each side where the wings are is where the strakes go. This area becomes the fuel tanks for the airplane. I think most builders would agree that building and sealing them is the most stressful part of the building process. It's not a good thing if they leak.
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