Mansfield: the fourth time was no more charmed than the third

Well, to be fair it is hard to blame the Mansfield Curse for this one. The forecast was never all that promising anyway, what with a bone-chilling 15F and high overcast in the offing. Still, it’s been awhile, and if Co-pilot Rick was willing to brave the frigid conditions, it would be undignified for the Capt. to be the one to wuss out. We arranged for an 0930 meeting at the ‘drome, but it just wasn’t to be. The initial Weather-out-the-Window(tm) observation looked promising: high, wispy clouds with a significant percentage of blue showing. One must consult a higher authority, however, when it comes to aviation forecasting and decision making. Off to DUATs to get the official view, once a cup of hot tea could be procured. Sadly, not only had the morning forecast not done anything to improve the below freezing temperatures, but it now also included a warning for “showers in the vicinity,” which was a new and unwelcome addition. With the temperature at 15F, one must assume that ‘showers’ means ‘snow’ and/or ‘ice’. That, and my normal aversion to starting Papa’s engine when it’s that cold out with only my sump heater to preheat, was enough to cancel for today.

As you can see, that probably wasn’t a horrible decision:

If that keeps up, I’ll be out plowing the driveway this afternoon – that will be enough of the outdoors for me today. As much as I hate the driveway clearing job, I can console myself with the idea that least it’s snow this time. My biggest beef with central Ohio winter weather is that it more often than not isn’t snow. Instead of nice puffy snow, we get ice or ice-byproducts like sleet or freezing fog. I don’t think I’d hate winter quite as much if we got real snow, the kind of snow you can do things with, things like riding snowmobiles or skiing. But, being as you have to go through winter with the weather you have and the weather that I have is more often than not utterly craptacular, I just stay inside and endure.

Saturday was pretty much the same story weather-wise, albeit with the exception of my having gone out long enough for an excursion to Lowes to pick up some wood and wood-byproducts. I’ve been struggling with the P-51 project because I’ve been using a 1/8″ piece of chipboard as a work surface. It is so thin and flexible that it doesn’t provide an even remotely acceptable work surface. It’s slightly better than a very large piece of typing paper, but not by much. The problem with getting something better is that we traded in our Durango for a Subaru Forester a few years ago and I haven’t been able to haul a large piece of plywood home without it. I finally decided to just go browse the shelves at Lowes and see if I couldn’t cobble something together out of materials that would fit in the Subie.

What I ended up with was three 5/8 x 12 x 72 particle boards. Being manufactured, they’re as flat as, well, boards, and plenty strong for what I’m using them for. A bonus trait was their price: cheap. I also picked up a few 2x4x96 to use to strap the three planks together, thereby forming a sturdy 3′ x 6′ worktop. It only took a few minutes to put it all together, although the job of lifting that heavy SOB up and onto Co-pilot Rick’s sawhorses took a little longer:

The kit is at one of those stages that are rife with danger. It’s time to bend the balsa top fuselage sheeting around the stringers, which is just the type of operation that inevitably ends in tears. Even thin balsa sheet wetted with warm water seems to maintain a preternatural bitterness (one could describe it as Pelosi-esque), so when I try to bend it, it invariably either cracks or breaks away from the fuselage at the lower glue joint:

It didn’t crack this time, although there were most assuredly some dire warnings in the form of cracking sounds emanating from the lower edge of both sheets. The glue will take the rest of the day to dry, so I won’t know until later whether or not it will all stick together once I remove the masking tape that’s currently holding it all together.

Oh, and those “showers in the vicinity?” Here they are, at just about the time we would have been returning:

I’m awarding myself a “Good Call” ribbon today.

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A little more work on the P-51

I still have no idea what I’m going to do with this thing, but it’s still nice to have something to work on. I found a bunch of leftover fiberglass from the kayak that I built last year, so I’m kicking around the idea of glassing the P-51. It’s not exactly fun work, but doing it would let me paint the plane using my HVLP spray gun and air compressor. That ought to be fun. I could give the plane to a neighbor that flies RC, but I’ve never been able to get over the Sunday afternoon when he stood behind me drinking a couple of Killian’s while I spend a couple of hours fixing his computer for him without offering at least one brew to me. Funny how that stuff sticks with you, and in his case, will cost him an opportunity for what will hopefully be a nice kit. The lesson here for everyone else is pretty obvious, eh?

The P-51 is a good time killer, but I’d really rather be building another boat. I’d still like a small sailing skiff to go with the kayak. Specifically, I’d like to be building a Jimmy Skiff, a kit sold my the same outfit that I bought the kayak kit from:

It’s pretty expensive, though. For now, I’ll keep going on the P-51 and see if I can stretch it out until the weather breaks in a few months. The type of work isn’t all that different. Today was sanding the wingtips and epoxy gluing a few parts in place:

It’s nice to get some use out of my boat building clamps, even if it’s not for building a boat:

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Freezing fog or freezing rain?

Who cares. It’s a sadistic perversion of the beautiful winter weather you see on Christmas cards. ski lodge brochures, and Hallmark Channel shows either way.

Sooo… the weather outside is frightful, inside it’s quite delightful, and so on. It’s a stay-in day, in other words. This is not an uncommon occurrence this time of year and as such I tried to lay in supplies during the week to keep myself occupied on days like these, unsuccessfully as it turns out. I was kicking around the idea of building a model plane. Trying to keep the cost down, I immediately ruled out a flying RC plane. The cost of the radio and a mid-size engine alone would be at least $300 and I don’t see any reason to head down that path.

At the bottom of the expenditure scale, I thought about a Guillow’s balsa model. I built a few of the smaller rubber band powered, balsa and tissue Guillow’s planes when I was a kid and I was wondering if 1) they were still in existenc, and 2) if they had anything a little larger than the small planes I had built before. I remember having problems with the small pieces/parts even back when I had decent manual dexterity and near vision – I don’t think I could do it at all now. I soon found their website and zeroed in on this:

It has a 24″ wingspan, big enough for clumsy fingers, poor eyesight, and a Cox .049 engine if I wanted to modify the kit for control-line flying. I’ve got a one acre backyard going to waste and I thought a control-line plane would work well back there. Guillow’s has plenty of other large kits, but this one has the benefit of being one of the first that they have upgraded to laser cut parts. Diecut parts can be infuriating to work with if they are poorly cut; you don’t take that chance with laser cut.

I went to Hobbytown on Friday to see if they had one, but the only Guillow’s kits they had were the tiny little kits I had built before. I investigated other alternatives while I was there, the idea of a small electric RC also in mind for the backyard. Everything that they had was ARF (almost-ready-fly) or worse, ready to fly right out of the box. That was true of the piston engine RC planes as well. Apparently no one builds their own anymore. At the risk of sounding like I walked five miles uphill (both ways!) to school every day, back when I was heavily into RC airplanes you had to build your own. Now being as I didn’t build my own RV-6 this may sound hypocritical, but what has become of our country? We can’t even build our own RC kits anymore? I also found out that you can’t get Cox .049 motors anymore. Man, do I feel ancient!

I found the Guillow kit on an internet mail order site for $25, so I might just go ahead and order one. Or… I could really get into this:

Video here.

I built a lot of Great Planes kits back in the day. In fact, they were my manufacturer of choice because of the high quality of their kits. I looked to see how much the radio and motor would be, thinking that maybe it would be cheaper than a gas engine. It was, but not by much. Bummer. Especially since I read through the build manual and it looks like a lot of fun to put together.

So, having failed in my search for a project, I was left with nothing to do but spend some more time straightening up the basement. And lo and behold, what did I find? Tucked back in a corner, behind a huge Miller Genuine Draft bar mirror was an old RC P-51 kit that I had started at least ten years ago. I can’t remember why I didn’t finish it, but I think it had something to do with gluing a part in the wrong place and not being able to fix it. Or tossing it into a box and hiding it in a dark corner out of sheer disgust. I’m fuzzy on that, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I pulled out the plans and build manual (which, surprisingly for me, is clearly marked as to exactly which steps I had completed) and laid out the big parts for inspection.

I think I can go ahead and start working on it with the assumption that it can be made flyable, although I doubt if I will want to buy a new radio or engine for it. If it comes to it, there’s always craigs list to look for that kind of stuff cheap. If I find that I had indeed made an unrecoverable mistake, I’ll just build it for display and donate it to JP’s BBQ over at Bolton.

Or I’ll just set it aside over by the abandoned canoe project, or let it sit on the porch swing. It doesn’t much matter what I end up doing with it as long as I enjoy spending time working on it, right? To me, that’s the whole point!

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Back in the swing of things

I’ll regret this during my annual winter bitchfest about the cold Ohio weather, but I’m going to say it anyway: it was too hot to fly this weekend. We all know, of course, that the heat alone cannot bear the full burden of the uncomfortable Ohio August and that the humidity is required to shoulder some of the blame. That’s neither here nor there – it all came down to whether I could drag myself out in the muggy summer sauna to go flying. I could not. Besides the oppressive blanket of heat and haze, it is important to not that the co-pilot was out of town. Flying anywhere would have been all of the work, but only half the fun.

I had other stuff to do anyway. I’m behind on my game reviews, so I knocked a couple of those out. And I have a porch swing project underway that hit a snag last week. I fixed that. I fortunately had not glued the slats into place, so it was just a matter of unscrewing them and using a pair of more accurately cut spacers to reposition them as I reinstalled them. Sounds easy, but leave it to me ti find a way to make it hard. I broke one of the screws while I was backing it out. After the liberal application of the magical incantations I normally use in situations like this (refer to George Carlin’s List of Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV for the complete set) and some quality time spent with a pair of pliers, I got it removed and replaced. Here’s the latest status shot:

The energy expended in vocalizing various combinations of the words soured my mood for woodwork, though, so I had to find something else to do on Sunday. I didn’t want to be outside for any longer than it took for the promised thunderstorms to arrive, so I made a short road trip down to Circleville Raceway Park, my former go kart racing venue. I wanted to see what improvements they had made in the 15 years since I stopped racing, and to see if the older generation was still racing. I still have my old kart and engine, and I was curious as to what kinds of equipment I’d be racing against if I started again. Frankly, it didn’t look like there had been any great advances since I quit. This venerable old European chassis might still be somewhat competitive:

Maybe a little refurbishment would make a good project once I get the porch swing done. I don’t know if I’d ever get back into racing, though. I think that I might like to, but even with already having the kart and engine there would be costs. I’d need a trailer hitch for the Subaru to pull it around, a new helmet, and a new driving suit. That’s close to $500 right there. Add whatever the kart would need – at a minimum that’s a new set of tires. That’s quite an investment just to find out that I’m older and slower and kart racing is behind me.

Now, a few minutes of 2-cycle Zen:

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A swing and a miss

I alluded to an update on the porch swing project, and here it is. It was time to add the back seat slats. There are 14 slats cut from 1x2s. The plans call for a 1 1/2″ gap on each end of the cleat (the horizontal 2×4 that the slats are attached perpendicular to) and 1 3/8″ spacing between each slat. The cleat is 42″ long, so that should work:

14 (slats) x 1.5″ = 21″
13 (gaps between slats) x 1 3/8 = 17.875″
2 (end space) x 1.5″ = 3″

Total width: 41.875″

To get the spacing right, I cut 1 3/8″ spacers from left over 1 x 2. I cut enough for the first seven slats:

Once the first seven were securely screwed in place, I used the spacers to position the second seven. That’s when the problem showed up. There’s not a 1.5″ gap on the end of the cleat:

I checked the math a few times to be sure, but the fact is that I have spaced them incorrectly. The only way for that to have happened would be if the spacers I cut from 1 x 2 weren’t the right size:

Uh, yeah, you think that might be the problem? Some of those were cut on the bandsaw, others on the table saw. I’m not sure which is worse, but I’m guessing the table saw. The width of the blade is such that there’s a bit of a difference in each cut. I guess it all adds up. Easy fix, though: I didn’t glue the slats, so I just need to unscrew them and try again with more consistently cut spacers.

Unrelated, Co-pilot Egg returned from three days at band camp this evening, and on my way over to the high school to pick her up, I made my normal reconnaissance of Bolton Field. It was the strangest thing. Out of the corner of my eye, and at a distance of over a mile, I could have sworn that I saw one of the vertical stabs of a B-24. That’s impossible, of course, but the more I looked the more it seemed like it just had to be a B-24.

Insatiably curious about exactly this kind of thing, I dropped Egg off asap after picking her up at the school and headed to the airport. Lo and behold, my airplane spotting was, well, spot on:

Based on the sign they had hung on the fence, it seems that they are in town to sell 30 minute rides for a “tax deductible donation of $425.” While I think it would be very cool to experience a ride in one of those venerable WWII work horses, that’s a bit too rich for my blood. Now, if I were to get to fly from the right or left seat, well that would be different. I doubt if that option is available, though.

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(S)he slats seats by the sea shore

Yeah, say that five times fast!

On vay-cay this week, so mornings are mine. A trip to Lowes, so much more sedate on a Monday morning than it is on weekends, brought home 10 1x2s. Typical of my luck, in a nearly completely empty store I end up being in the way of a wheelchair bound fella that just happened to need access to the exact same pile of wood. It’s just like when I turn around in someone’s driveway: the homeowner invariably comes down the road and wants to pull into his driveway, and there I am. I swear, it’s nearly every single time! Well, I was 8 boards through my 10 board selection process and not keen on giving way, so I rushed through the last two and paid for my haste later, as we’ll see.

The slats are cut from those same 1x2s, and any kind of bend (lengthwise horizontally, lengthwise vertically, or both) is going to translate into a shoddy looking seat. So does my innate ability to cut the same intended length to an ultra-imprecise 1/4″ tolerance, but that’s different somehow. You know how it is: I screw up, fine. I paid for the privilege. The wood is bent from the get-go? Well, that’s an alternatively hued equine, is it not? I was out of luck right out of the gate. Never had a chance. Well, that’s the true cost of buying cheap wood, a practice I will continue until such time as I gain sufficient competence and confidence to use the pricier stuff.

With the slats cut, it’s glue & screw time. Having learned the lesson of pre-drilling the holes, it went much more smoothly than before. The gallon jug (the vinegar today, as suited my mood) made a reappearance, this time holding the bottom edge of the first slat in place while I aligned and drilled the first hole. The plans call for a 1/2″ space between each slat, and conveniently enough I had cut out a couple of 1/2″ spaces to hold the front edge of the seat frame flush while I coerced it into permanently holding shape:

As I proceeded to add more slats, it became more obvious that a lot of the wood was inconveniently bent. Sometimes I could reduce the gap between slats with the simple expedient of reorienting the newest board, but that would only work now and then. One board was so bent that I just tossed it to the scrap pile. You might be able to see the gap between the slats in this picture, or it might be that I’m just too sensitive to it:

With all of the slats in place except the ninth, which goes in after the back piece is mounted, I gave it a test sit:

A little bendy, isn’t it? Maybe that comes from using cheap pine too.

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The Harbor Freight Tax

Family obligations are keeping me and Papa more or less grounded for the entire weekend, but I’m on vacation all week so I think we’ll get a trip in soon. I might even get a short hop today in support of distracting a neighbor while the arrangements for is surprise birthday party are finalized. It should be quite a surprise to land at Bolton after his ride and find his 40th birthday being celebrated at JP’s BBQ, right there on the airport. Well, it will be a surprise if he doesn’t suddenly discover this blog in the next hour.

Later: It was a nice ride, but hot (96F), bumpy, and windy (11G18, 270 degrees) enough to make the landings look ham-fisted and clumsy. Even the takeoff from Bolton had a little moment when we were just off the runway and the gusting wind… stopped gusting. The instant loss of airspeed caused a little dip that almost took us back to the runway. Nothing dangerous – it’s more of a point of pride to only touch the ground with the airplane when you’re actually trying to. Anything else is simply bad form.

The passenger wasn’t expected at his surprise party until 1:30, so we had an hour to kill. As I mentioned, it was hot and bumpy, so I didn’t want to spend the full hour futilely burning gas and getting him ever more queasy, so I mentioned to him that I hope to take a trip this week and ought to stop at MadCo to gas up before the prices could get any higher. Dragging my feet through the refueling which for once (untimely, that) didn’t include waiting behind a bunch of other planes. Nope, when you want to kill time, everything invariably goes quickly. Commits suicide of its own volition, it does. Damned inconvenient. But I was able to fuddle around reading the directions on the self serve pump, and lamenting just how slow the gas pumps are.

In any event, we hit the pattern back at Bolton at 1:25, bounced our way into a poorer-than-average landing, and pulled up on the ramp. Which, of course, was not where we had departed from. I explained it off as my being out of beer in the hangar and thus having the need to get something to drink from JP’s. And that he’d be hot waiting in the plane, so he ought go with. And what with his girlfriend and kids having promised to meet him upon his return anyway, JP’s was the most accessible place on the field, and although they weren’t in sight, they were bound to show up soon. And being this hot, maybe they’re waiting over in the shade of the party barn, and no search would be complete without looking there. Which, well, he fell for like the proverbial 2000 lbs. of brick. “Surprise!!” shouted the crowd.

I turned back to him, and completely deadpan said, “Oh, here they are.”

Mission complete.

With that done, it was back to the porch swing project:

Not that it upsets me all that much, but it never fails that any new project will eventually be the direct cause of a trip to Harbor Freight for to procure some exotic new tool for which I had never before felt ample need to buy. In the case of the porch swing, the tool in question was a right angle drill guide. A princely sum of $17.99 for it, thus moving me incrementally closer to the ever-increasing the risk that is incumbent with any type of project: it will end up costing more to build than to simply buy.

‘Tis a nifty tool, though, and of the type that foreshadows those inevitable “Wow, I’m glad I had that!” moments that will arise in projects still well over the horizon:

The need for a tool whose entire reason d’etre is to ensure the drilling of a completely straight hole is, in this case, the holes that will be drilled vertically through the 2×6 seat sides in to pass the supporting swing ropes through. Drilling a 5/8″ diameter hole the long way through a 2×6 is hard enough to do in and of itself, but keeping it vertically aligned the whole way adds even further complexity to the task. One would not want the drill to pierce the side of the board, after all. Out the bottom and out of sight is the goal here.

It worked pretty well, although the narrowness of the board combined with the flexibility inherent in a cheap plastic tool bit cause it to wander around a bit. Get it? A “bit?” Drill bit? Get it?? Hmm, tough room. Better keep my day job!

It worked almost perfectly, but there was one little problem: I need to drill a 5 1/2″ hole, but the guide (and the bit, for that matter) reached their limits at about 5 3/8″. I had to disassemble the entire apparatus and flip the woodwork over to finish the holes from the opposite side. Fortunately, the bit had just enough length to at least poke a guide hole in the bottom for me to follow.

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The seat frame

It sure looked easy enough. Downhill all the way after those pesky curved cuts were done. Putting the seat frame together looked to be simply a matter of building a rectangle.

I measured and marked where the 2 2x4s would go in relation to the side pieces that I made last night and laid it all out on the floor. The parts are glued and screwed together: Elmers wood glue and 2.5″ #10 wood screws. 2.5″ is a long way to go through pine, but screwing one into a test piece showed that it could be done. I thought it would be a good idea to countersink the outside surface, though, so the tops of the screws would be flush with the sides:

Isn’t the impressive? I’ll bet you’re thinking that those screws went right on in and seated themselves all nice and flush and… What? You don’t think that? Well, you’re right:

Stripped out and stuck. Twice! I had to turn them back out with a pair of pliers, drill the hole all the way down, then put in new screws. And it would have worked too, except for one thing: the top screw went right on down into the hole easy as could be and… stuck. Stuck right in the same place as before. Now, I’d like to be able to tell you that it had run into a solid, impermeable pine knot and that no one could have foreseen such a blameless and unpredictable event. But I can’t. What I had done is picked up the same stripped out screw that I removed with the pliers only minutes before and ran it right back down in there. It never had a chance. And it had to come right back out, didn’t it?

Well, I wasn’t really in the mood to pull it back out again right away. I had earned a break, even if it had been earned through an example of abject boobery. Work is work, productive or not. So, a break. So, do you remember that part where I said the joints a screwed and glued? Well, I remembered the screwed part, but not the glued part. I thought it was hard getting that screw out the first time; after that glue set up, it was even harder to get that thing back out of there, not least because the head of the thing was getting pretty mangled.

That screw sitting on the top of the side rail? Oh, look very closely at its head. Once I got the mangled screw out for the second time, I made sure to go to the bench and get a replacement. I put the new one in the hole and hit it with the drill: nothing. Of all the times to pick a bad screw out of a brand new box of screws, it had to be on this one damn painful hole.

Once I finally got a screw into that hole, I proceeded to drill the other joints:

You may be asking yourself what the purpose of those gallon jugs of fluid perched on the corners of the frame is, and I have an answer: they’re holding the corners down. I’m using cheap wood again, and at least one of the 2x4s is warped enough that it caused a huge twist in the frame. Those jugs are what I had handy, but they were by no means the optimal tool to use. They kept falling off at the most inopportune times!

Once it was all screwed together, though, it flattened out nicely:

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Taking another swing at it

I picked up the borrowed bandsaw from Co-pilot Rick last night, and tonight I used it to re-cut the part that I messed up so badly with the jigsaw. The top of the ruined board was actually still usable as a template for marking the cut line on the new board, so that only took a matter of moments to trace, and it was off to the saw:

Ahhhh, that’s better:

I went ahead and cut the second piece, and they match fairly well:

If you get right up close, you can see where they don’t exactly match:

Ok, who’s got a belt sander??

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Had it been me rather than Noah…

… we’d have no animals today. There’s no way I could have built that ark.

The weather yesterday was thunderstorm after thunderstorm after thunderstorm, and as is my wont, I got to thinking about projects. After a brutally long Google hunt, I arrived at this:

It has everything I look for in a project: useful, inexpensive, and at least at a cursory glance, easy enough for even me to build:

How hard could it be? There’s only one curved part, after all. Well, two, but they’re identical to each other. What could go wrong there? Oh… yeah. They could end up with one inch gaps between them that would guarantee that it would never float. No, that’s the canoe project that I’m thinking of. This should be much simpler.

This morning started out cloudy and muggy, and even though it was supposed to clear up at around 3pm, I knew that I had an raft load of chores that I’ve been putting off. If there was to be any flying at all, it would be a short ride in the cool of the evening. So off to Lowes, hopefully before the normal Sunday crowd.

I decided not to buy the entire load of wood for two reasons, the first being that there is only so much lumber you can carry in a Subaru Forester. The second was, of course, that I didn’t want to end up with a bunch of wood if I couldn’t get that curved piece right. The list calls for a single 2 x 6 x 10 pine board, but I can’t fit a 10′ length in the Subie. Lowes had an 8′ length, though, so I bought two. I also went ahead and got a couple of 2 x 4s too, since the step after cutting the curved parts is to join them together with 2 x 4s.

As I was checking out, the cashier dude asked me if I was building a small porch swing. I hate to admit it, but I was simply astonished that he could figure that out based on a purchase of four innocuous planks, right up until I realized that I was holding the plans. Duh. The boards fit (barely) into Red Sue and we made an uneventful trip back home, where I got the chores out of the way. With that done, it was time to get to work.

The curved line that needs to be cut in the 2 x 6s is shaped the same way as was done on the canoe: they give you measurements to a couple of points and you use something flexible to make and trace the curve. The measurements are pretty straightforward, but I didn’t have enough hands to hold the PVC pipe in place while tracing the line:

The curves look OK to me:

Time to cut:

At this very moment, I have two conflicting emotions: a devout hatred of jigsaws, matched only by my burning desire for a band saw. This cut, as a matter of understatement, did not go well:

Fortunately, I have plenty more 2 x 6 and can try again.

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