Well the plane is moving again!  This time to my most excellent workshop (actually it is my garage).    When I built this part of the house I fully anticipated building/working on a planes so I made the shope extra large 30×30 ft.  At one time I had two canards in (a Varieze and a LongEZ fuselage).   It has a 11 ft ceiling and is free span (I used a big I-beam for the center support).  Most importantly for the summer in the south is that it has a super big ass air conditioner, TV, Stereo and a frig.  What a great place to go to work.

These are two buddies.  Tony Cole (left) Nick Annon (A.Nick the big bruiser) .    I like Tony because we get along famously, laugh a lot and he is from the British mother land (funny being he is now living in a former colonies and enjoying it).   He is building a LongEZ and I just love his English accent.    Tony left for a few weeks right after the move to work on his house back in England.   He goes back once a year, so you know where my first trip abroad is going to be.  

A.Nick is fun.   Kind of hard not to love a big, puppy dog….     U.Nick U and A.Nick,  Brains and brawn.

Looks sleek in the shop!

Anyone for a Zima?

Today was spend on designing the instrument panel.   Talk about stuffing 5 gallons of sh*t in a 1 gallon bucket!   If you just look at the indiviual components, it looks absoultely impossible to fit everything into the space I have to work with.  There is something to be said about computer modeling!

 Fortunately the GRT has inputs for alarms hich will eliminate all warning lights on the dash.

I cant wait to start cutting out the panel…

Summary of the next few days of work.  Boring stuff, researching parts and looking through catalogs.

1. Ordered a bunch of electric parts and the RAM mounts.

2. Went to the machine shop to check on the sump….  not done.  Not even started.  I threatened to take to another shop and the owner promised to get started on it immediately.

3. Got the paint on the plane coded so I could get it mixed.  The gray is matched exactly to the gray interior vinyl and will be used on the instrument panel.  Blue and white match the exiting colors.

4. Worked on ACAD panel design.

5. Worked on the electrical system.  Some of the parts I wanted to use would not fit in the panel.  So I had to search again for smaller switches.