Soaring in New England

I had to throw this picture in here from yesterday's 3.5 hour flight in the 1-23. This picture was taken at about 5600 feet just North of Worcester, MA.

Oh-oh

It appears my wife has decided that 4 trailers in the yard may be 4 too many? She now has her own blog.....http://gliderwife.blogspot.com/ with some nifty trailer pictures. And I thought I was doing her a favor by reducing the area of the lawn she needs to mow?

Wing discoloration

There is some discoloration around the mid-wing joint where a thick layer of rubbery filler had been added to cover the exposed rivets and the steel from the center of the pop rivet rusted somewhat....no corrosion though, so I think we are still OK.

State of the art 02 system

State of the art....in 1957. I suppose something like this was good enough for Paul Bickle to reach 46267 feet in 1961 in a Schweizer 1-23, but I think I'll retire it.

The harness is looking a little "ratty" as well....

Trailer scavenging pas de deux

Found a nice Schweizer 1-35 open trailer in NH. Will make a good base for the HP-14 enclosed trailer, I hope!

Paint Stripping

Going to be a long haul to strip the paint....takes patience and focusing on one small area at a time. There is a lot of filler underneath the paint, not sure what the best method will be for dealing with that!

YUCK! Mouse nests!

Removed all of the floors and instrument pedestal today before a thunderstorm hit. Huge mouse nest filling up the inside of the instrument pedestal...smelled horrible. No corrosion so far.....all the mixer components look fine. Can't get the tailcone off due to some frozen screws. There is a lot of work to do back there....the fiberglass fairing for the ruddervators is pretty trashed and of course the bondo filler is cracking off everywhere.

She's Home!

Even though I don't have enough room in the garage carved out yet, I figured the ship could sit outside for a bit longer with no additional pain...after sitting out for over a decade! So, we unloaded her tonight. Tomorrow I'll build some wing stands so I can start to pull the flaps and ailerons off, and hose off the years of grime to see what's underneath!

Trailer scavenging

I finally found a good frame to act as the base for the HP-14 trailer. I now have a tandem axle 20 foot boat trailer sitting in the yard......beside the 1-23 trailer, and behind a 13-ft Boston Whaler I'm trying to sell...I'm sure the neighbors are jealous since I see them gathering in small groups and pointing at my yard quite often these last few days...

I also purchased 5 gallons of aviation-strength eco-friendly (so it says) paint stripper. Hopefully we'll get the ship unpacked out of the borrowed trailer and start work on it within the next few days, but the weather still sucks here (one soaring flight in all of June!) and the club is supposed to do some winch launches in Springfield, VT next week, so decanting the HP might take another week.....blah.

Just bought an HP-14 sailplane

With lots of help from members of the GBSC soaring club, we pulled the HP-14 out of a backyard and now have it safely in a (borrowed) trailer until we can add a temporary extension onto my garage to accomodate the wingspan of this 17 meter ship. After that we start cleaning and paint removal to see what shape she's in after sitting outside uncovered for over a decade.