MYRO moves house

I’d arranged to meet up with Bob at the airfield yesterday morning at 9.00 am and when I arrived, I found that as well as Robert, who Bob said had also kindly offered to help out, Scott, who I’d not met before, was also there. Robert flies a very pretty yellow Easy Raider and Scott a flex wing, a Flash II Alpha I think. I was really pleased that they were there because I didn’t really know what to expect when collecting MYRO’s wings from Canterbury and trailering them over the Maidstone except I knew that the more hands there were, the easier it would be.

Rosie’s trailer hadn’t moved from the spot where I left it back in June of last year so when we went to pull it out, I shouldn’t have been surprised when we found that one wheel was seized solid. Scott suggested that the problem was only a brake and after I’d found a large block of wood and given the wheel a few whacks with it, we did indeed hear the sound of the brake springing off.

If there had only been two of us, it would have been a tricky job to get MYRO’s wings down off the hangar wall where they had been hanging since August 2008 and onto the trailer, but with four of us it was easy. There are two wooden boxes fixed to the trailer top to take the AX3’s wheels and I thought that if the wings were stood on the trailer to the inside of these, tied together and tied down in an inverted ‘V’ with plenty of padding, they wouldn’t be able to move very much on the journey. This is how it looked with the wings loaded up.

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But as for the wings not shifting, I couldn’t have been more wrong. We stopped as we left the airfield and even with the small number of bumps we’d been over, there had already been some movement. So we adjusted and tightened the ropes, carried on and stopped again before we turned onto the A2. I watched the wings as we drove and was horrified to see how much they were being moved every time a large lorry or other vehicle overtook us as a result of the massive amount of air they displaced 😯

And it was just my luck that a ferry had obviously recently docked at Dover because they came past us one after another. We had to stop several times because I was very concerned about the padding moving so much that the wing fabric covering was damaged and I thought we had succeeded but unfortunately, after we’d turned off the M2 motorway on which we were unable to stop, and were able to check, I found that we had completely lost a couple of the large foam rubber pads and there was a small nick on one leading edge. This was such a pity because up to then, both wings had been perfect but fortunately the damage is not too bad and will be almost unnoticeable when I’ve had a chance to repair it.

One of the aileron edges also got a little nick on it when someone opened the tailgate without looking but as far as I could see when we unloaded the wings and temporarily put them into a hangar at Linton, those were the only two spots of damage on them, so that was not too bad. Pity though 😕

After that we all enjoyed a brew and one of Bob’s double fried egg rolls and we then left to pick up MYRO’s fuselage from my garage. This was a doddle compared to the nightmare of trailering the wings because with the main wheels in the two wheel boxes on the trailer, it was an easy matter to tie MYRO down really tightly, as you can see in the next two pics.

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I would imagine that these will be the last pictures that will ever be taken of MYRO outside my garage where it has lived for the past 10 months or so. This made for a rather nostalgic moment for me, but I have to say that I was glad that the time had finally arrived 🙂

It didn’t take long to get MYRO to Linton and it was a great moment for me when we lifted it off the trailer to see it back in its natural environment, on an airfield. It was so much more pleasing to see it standing outside a hangar rather than my garage as you can see from the last two pics for this post.

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By this time the day was beginning to take its toll on me and I have to confess that I was beginning to feel pretty tired. I was therefore very grateful indeed when Paul agreed to let me push MYRO into a back corner in his hangar where he said it could stay until I get it re-rigged and the wings back on. I had hoped that that would be tomorrow (Sunday) but earlier today I checked the box of rigging parts that were given to me with MYRO and I found that the four main wing fixing bolts are missing. So as I will have to order those from P & M on Monday, I may as well replace all of the rigging pins as well and do a proper job. This means that I won’t be able to do the re-rigging until next weekend and I’ll give Paul a ring tomorrow to let him know. I hope he’ll let me leave MYRO in his hangar in the meantime, but I think he will.