6 hours.
I found my missing length of piano hinge (hidden inside a piece of PVC to keep it from getting damaged), and took it and my intersection fairings up to OXR to see what I could get done. I got up there and spent a lot of time pondering the instructions and plans. I spent a lot of time doing that because this is real work about to be done here, and it involves fiberglass, and the cutting of things that affect the flight characteristics of the airplane.
The first thing I did was put the wheel fairing attach brackets on. This is a stupid process if ever there was one. I had to wrangle the engine hoist from down at the EAA hangar, walk it halfway across the airport, then lift each side of the plane by running a strap around the engine mount so I could get the wheel off I’m not shelling out a couple hundred bucks for some weird attachment, this seems to work just find. With the wheel off, I could attach the bracket.
The gear leg fairings, on the surface, are not that complex. They’re teardrop-shaped covers for the round gear legs. The only tricky part is that they have to be built with no twist in them. There’s a full-scale section of a drawing that needs to be cut out and used as a template. This lets you know where you can cut the fairings, and the fairings are the same ones used for all Van’s aircraft except the -8 and the -8A. They are attached by means of a couple of hose clamps and secured by a piece of piano hinge running up the trailing edge. So they have to be cut straight, then there’s the hinge installation, then the alignment to the fuselage. I got one part of one leg cut, and had to move brake tubing out of the way and cut clearance divots where that wasn’t feasible.
Other time was taken up by moving the late Jim Ayers’s RV3 (with the Walter LOM engine) out of the EAA hangar and down to his private hangar waaaay at the other end of the airport. Ron and I rigged up a way to lash the tailwheel to one of the forks of the old propane forklift and he towed it, driving backwards, really slowly. I followed him in his VW. After we got back from that, we went for a ride in the Pacer.
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