I'd really like to hear from anyone reading this ... I opened up the comments to anyone with or without signing in to whatever account thing this site has. Just a few words of "hello" or "having fun reading" or even "I have a hanger and towplane and a trailer you're welcome to use." I'm just curious who all is reading.

So I caught up on some other pressing stuff around the house & office, so I decided to do a little assembly work this morning. Notably, I installed the elevator control line pulleys sometime earlier this week while it was raining.

Now, I also made the control linkage part to connect the sliding tube to the elevator itself. Well, um, there is no elevator per-se. I haven't yet bent the 3/8" tubes to make up the trailing edge for the elevator. Despite this, the elevator leading edge is done and hinged. So it's a little anti-climactic. But now I have another moving part!

The bottom of the control linkage shows off more of the temporary work back here. The marine pulleys from Harken are rather smooth and very nice actually. They'll do much better with larger line. The control tube guides will also do much better when they're bonded to the structure with epoxy and cabosil. The foam anti-twist supports will be nicer too without the wrap of electrical tape, so look out for that to happen when I mix up some big batch for doing ribs in the next month.

Speaking of ribs, I did a little work during the last snow storm to attach the horizontal stabilizer to the vertical tail, necessitating some filing of aluminum and using the die set from Harbor Freight.

That's all for now!

Harbor Freight is my friend

I have heard the name Harbor Freight before, but hadn't ever really looked into them. With the snow finally plowed enough to get out, venturing to Harbor Freight was on the list! Their prices on tools I have bought before were generally half what I paid ... meaning a half-hour drive to the store is worth the savings. I bought several random things, including a tap & die set to make the quick-pins for Goat. I already modified the horizontal stabilizer AN3-30A bolt to accept two lock-nuts (low profile ones) and trimmed it to 1-1/8" long. Now my previously jury-rigged bolt actually stays in by itself! I was thinking hard about getting a drill press for making all those sheet metal parts a bit easier, eventually deciding against it since I'm almost done making those kinds of parts, heh.

In other news, I started a jig to re-bend the keel tube. I have to find some fine-grained sand to stuff the tube before I try to bend it this time. I have been told that will dramatically help reduce the kinking, along with a good jig of course.

No pictures this time.

I did give a go at sleeping inside that igloo by the way. Unfortunately, I didn't put in a secondary vent hole, relying simply on the main entrance for ventilation. After about two hours outside, I woke up extremely light-headed and abandoned it... I was quite warm, I think my CO2 was just not escaping enough without that vent. DOH.

An igloo?

Goat is waiting in line behind some RC projects right now ... and then it snowed ~20" today, so we made an igloo in the front yard. Oh yeah :-)

It's big enough inside that I can crouch on my feet and we can get two adults inside. I'm seriously debating sleeping inside just to be EXTREME! Actually, if I kept dry, I'm sure it would be fairly comfortable inside. While digging it out, you could see steam leaving the entrance from body heat melting the snow. Despite being soaking wet from working several hours on it, the temperature change (or at least getting rid of wind chill) is noticeable. Ah, the insulating power of water!

If I had to do it again, I would buy a snow shovel first.