Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Plane Project
No new pictures of Guy this week so I thought I'd share these with you. Somewhere back when we set up this Blog we mentioned a few of our other interests besides raising Guy. It's lucky we did or I might have almost forgotten what we used to do with ourselves before he came along. One of my long term schemes is to get airborne in a machine of my own making. The year before Guy was born I came across a partly finished aircraft project that was looking for a new home and builder to finish it off. To cut a long story short, I had time to finish off a few household landscaping projects, like a large deck, four flights of steps, a raised vege garden, retaining wall, windbreak, three gates, garden seat, and construct a shed extension for storing the aircraft, and then Guy was born. After that not a lot got done on the plane. 
However, this month things have started to happen. The aircraft had been partially completed by the previous owner, he'd built the fuselage, tail and horizontal stabiliser, which had been stored in the rafters of our single car garage. (Yes the car, motorcycle, two mountainbikes, two work benches and chest freezer still fit, but you do have to think before waving your arms around, and cat swinging is right out of the question). The task facing me now is to 'just' build the wing. Its 28 feet from tip to tip, hence the temporary the extension to the garage, (if the council ask it's for growing tomatoes OK!)
Anyway, work has commenced, and in a month of Wednesday nights I have completed the first tricky job of constructing an accurate work surface along the wall of the garage, consisting of wooden frames which hold the wing components in the correct shape while I rivet them together. That's the collection of wooden triangles in the photo, the green thing is part of the aluminuim wing beam.
While this painstaking and not very exciting work was going on, there was a rare afternoon when the wind ceased howling over our house and I took the oppurtunity to assemble all the major components in our driveway, and wash them while I was washing the car. The stated reason for this exercise was to wash off the cobwebs and dust that had accumulated while in storage, but it was more than just a bit motivational. As you can see from some angles it is quite recognisably an aircraft. For further motivation I have attached two photos of completed Pazmany Pl-2 aircraft. I particulalrt like the racy orange colour scheme. A long way from here but all journeys start with a small step, Guy proves that to us every day.
# posted by Jack and Katrina @ 8:16 pm 
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Looks like great fun. I'm keen to go for a spin (not literally, well maybe) when it's built.
I'm not building anything so interesting in my living room, but if summer carries on like it has been I might build an ark.
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I'm not building anything so interesting in my living room, but if summer carries on like it has been I might build an ark.
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