ragingliberal.com

I am no fan of meetings. But worse than meetings are unneccesarily long meetings.

today I had half an hour between my stand up and my first hour long meeting; a usability test. Then I had an 11am to 3pm meeting about project branching. Not only did it run late by a half hour, but it never met its goal.

I am not sure who to blame but whomever was supposed to be running it let it veer off course. It turned into a gripe session.

after work, Eric and I went to Don Pablos and theraputically vented our frustrations.

I went home afterwards and worked in my shop a bit. I finished the fix on the combat planes aelerons and made some more progress on the chipmunk wing. I have many more projects, but none that will be completed today.

also, I moved cubes to jaydeeps old cube so the webcam on the left should be different now.

Someday I’ll have to start getting more than five hours of sleep per night…

I stopped by the hobby store on the way home to get some 4-40 all threaded and epoxy. I lost one of the aeleron linkages on the combat plane in its last flight. So after cutting and screwing it back in I soldered it. But forgetting how much heat that generated I managed to melt the servo horns.

I made real headway on the chipmunk wing. I’m using 30 minute epoxy that has a 24 hour full cure, so I must be patient. Because the fail point has been the same spot several times, I bore out a long segment and doubled up a new ply insert. When its done and sanded, I’ll show you what I mean. Right now all my clips are holding together the planes body while more epoxy cures.

I mostly want to fix it just to show it can be done.

I’m particularily proud of the motor which I carefully dissassembled and corrected its bent shaft. I even dropped and found a set screw in the process (that never happens).

tommorrow I start on the sailplane (I pulled the lazy bee motor from the plane I hate). If the weather holds l want to hit the field wednesday and saturday.

lisa may even come out to watch sat.

Later more couches arrived and large oak enclosed stereo speakers were set up…

I pulled the chipmunk winged plane out on Sunday despite the high winds. Miikka noticed the wing seemed loose and warned me prior to lift off. I figured he was talking about the rear screw.

I took off and cruised over the pond. As I gained speed and altitude over the corn field, the wing suddenly ripped off.

as the wing fluttered and flipped down in the wind, the body rocketted down like a missle.

in the photos posted first, you see where I found the wing. The club house is in the upper left. The next shots are where I found the body.

the front brace of the wing, which has been repaired many times, broke again. The sheer force of air tore the wing out and was strong enough to tear out the aeleron servo (which vanished, probably in the field somewhere).

ironically I almost always would add extra rubber bands to the landing gear and wings for such an emergency but had forgotten this time.

the question remains; can it be rebuilt? Stay tuned!

Where I found the wing…

Great day flying. The car guys created quite a cloud at dusk

The webcam at work has been running nearly nonstop since january. I checked its output folder and there were 14,777 photos - one every 10 minutes (though it was off a bit in feb).  I made a video of my life at work.  It's in the podcast feed, but you download it directly here:

FebToMarch-LifeAtWork