Finishing Kit

Over the last few days, I've diverted my attention a bit from directly following the plans in order. I've learned by this point that it's okay to change up the order in which you do things on this project. Not always, but some of the time. So I find myself taking a few liberties to jump around a bit. But before getting into the details, I had another wonderful visit from some new friends!

I had my first contact from Don & Lynore several weeks ago. They're from Vancouver Island up north of here, in Canada. He's very interested in possibly building an RV and they were planning a trip down this way to visit Vans Aircraft. So I invited them to stop by for a visit and to see my project, since it's on the way for them anyway. So they came by on May 5th early in the afternoon. We had a wonderful time with them. Jamie was home and she had a nice visit with Lynore after the ladies spent a token amount of time in the shop with us. I'm really impressed with Don. He flew jet aircraft in the military for years, and was an instructor as well. They're retired now and looking for a plane of their own. He was very prepared for our visit and was loaded with questions. He even had a printed list of questions ready for me! I enjoyed answering all of them as best as I could, and we looked over my project in great detail. Then I showed him all my tools and talked about how things are done. I love it. I really enjoyed their visit a lot. What a great guy. And Jamie really enjoyed meeting Lynore. They really hit it off. We went out for happy hour afterwards and ate dinner with them. I'm not sure yet if they'll build an RV, but they were headed to Vans the next day for a tour of the factory and a demo flight. We hope to stay in touch with them, one way or the other, and see them again soon!

Well, back to business. I've been looking at this canopy frame. My friend Mike Bullock was here a while back and he told me how much he dreaded this thing. So I decided I might as well jump into the fray and get started with it. I spent quite a few hours over the weekend carefully deburring the whole thing. Most of the deburring is careful, tedious hand work. I just wanted to get it done and out of the way so I could move on.

I spent pretty much all my available hours this weekend working on this thing. But it's deburred and ready to go. When it was done, I had to cleco the skin in place just to check the fit and see what it looks like. Now I have a skin to deburr, then move on from there.

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