Malbec open again – at last!

Tuesday was warm and sunny, so I thought that as well as taking the opportunity to finish off the repair on 77ASY’s strobe light, I’d also see if I could mow Chateau Malbec’s runway. There were still a few damp patches but the grass was so long that if it wasn’t cut pretty soon it would become a tough job for a mower with only a 1 metre diameter cut and would also prevent the damp patches from drying out.

So I loaded my ride-on onto my trailer in the morning and set off for the airfield. I couldn’t do anything much on the strobe light other than polish the new paint up a bit because I needed to get some new screws to fix the light back onto the aircraft. So after I’d done the paint, which I was disappointed with as it had an awful brown tinge and to me stuck out like a sore thumb, I got on with mowing the runway.

The job went well and after I’d got a good width cut, Philippe turned up. He wanted to get his Citius out of the hangar to give it a clean up, so while he went off to get some water, I cut the area in front of his and Victor’s hangars before continuing.

I was very pleased with how it went, especially as by taking special care to cut the really long stuff in a low gear so I was only moving forward slowly, I’d succeeded in doing almost the whole width without incident. Then I made a fatal mistake. I became over-confident and tried to cut the last long clump without changing gear. It jammed the blades almost immediately and in the process of clearing them, the cutting belt snapped.

It was my own fault and I’ve since ordered a couple of replacements so I have a spare, but luckily the runway was all mown except for a final strip on one side that nobody would even notice except me. Here are a few shots of the runway and Philippe’s aircraft after I was done.

I would like to have wheeled 77ASY out and gone for a flight, but I couldn’t because its strobe light was still hanging off. It didn’t stop Philippe, though and as he’d decided that cleaning the Citius with a bucket and sponge wasn’t on (a hosepipe is what’s really needed), he decided that he’d go for a short flight. And it was short, very short, because as soon as he took off, he said that his reserve fuel light came on. So he had to land immediately as that meant, just as in my Savannah, that he only had 7 litres in the tanks.

I shot a short video on my still camera that can be seen by clicking on the following image. It’s not very good because in the middle of the take off roll, it decided to automatically go totally out of focus, for some reason, and that bit had to be cut out.

I’d hoped that I’d be able to quickly get hold of some suitable screws to reattach ASY’s strobe light so I could get a flight in too, but it wasn’t to be. The screws needed to be over-sized because the holes in the wingtip had become enlarged and the ones that I got from making trips to BricoJem in Rouffignac and les Briconautes in Montignac wouldn’t go through the fixing holes in the strobe light fitting. By the time that I’d managed to carefully drill those out without damaging the fitting and get the light refitted on the wingtip, it was too late. So a second disappointment for the day!

Here’s a shot of the light fitting back on ASY’s wing. It doesn’t look too bad but I’m still not happy with the job because of the dirty tinge that the paint has.

I came across some bright white spray paint at les Briconautes and bought a can while I was there as my pride won’t allow me to leave it as it is. So the light fitting will have to come off one more time for me to give the wingtip another flash coat of paint in the hope of getting a finish that I’ll be happy with. But in the longer term, as the strobes still don’t work anyway, I think I’ll end up removing them completely and replacing them with a new, modern light-weight LED set.