Well, my family headed for home at just after 6.00 am local time today and I received a call on my mobile earlier this evening to let me know that they’d made Calais safely and were waiting to board the ferry to Dover. It was great having them over to stay and I must say that the house seems very empty now without them. Toddie loves company too and he’s been moping around quite a bit for most of the day. The sad thing is that at his age, this may be the last time that he’ll ever see them, but there’s no point dwelling on that as who knows what’s around the corner.
Today I’ve been busying myself doing washing and starting to ready myself and the house for the arrival of a friend to stay in two days time. So not much time with lots to do and the deadline is that I have to be at the station at Souillac south of Brive early on Wednesday evening to pick her up. So no slippage possible! After having nobody to stay for over a year, my house is like a revolving door at the moment with people coming and going 🙂
Since fully assembling the X-Air, I’ve been unable to do much more on it for the past few days. I can’t fly it to Galinat until I’ve made the outdoor covers that I have planned for it and although I thought I already had some brass eyelets, when I went out to check I found that in fact I only had one left. So I can do nothing until the ones that I’ve now ordered arrive. I’ve cut out one wing cover which, if it fits nicely I’ll be able to use as a pattern for the other. However, I can’t check to see how good it is until I’ve taken off the temporary covers that I’ve put over the aircraft and it would be too involved to remove them and replace them again. I only want to take them off when I can replace them, and the wing covers especially, with the ones I’m making. The following pic shows what I mean.
It’s as well that I put the temporary covers on, though. After having day after day with temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius plus, today, when I wanted to hang washing out to dry, we had rain. How typical is that! But at least the X-Air stayed dry and it’ll be ready for when I can return to it to finish off my work. The last job Mike, my brother-in-law, and I did was insert all the wing battens. After my experience with MYRO when through a combination of old covers and carelessness I managed to rip an internal wing batten pocket, I did the job on the X-Air with bated breath until I’d finished. But no worries, everything went smoothly and they all went in nicely with just three or four being a bit tight at the end. So here’s the X-Air fully back all in one piece.
It was only when I’d finished that I realised that I’ve fitted the ‘spare’ wing covers and not the ones that were on it when I flew it last September, which were all yellow without the blue leading edges (see my main headline blog pic). But no matter, although the yellow ones are possibly in slightly better condition than the ones I’ve used, the latter are good and the others will keep in my nice dark ‘grenier’ for use in the future. I just need to touch the colours up a bit where they’ve been folded, especially along the wing leading edges as can be seen, which I’ll be able to do later on. Now I just need the eyelets and a bit of time while my friend’s here to make the covers 😉