Covers almost done

I made good progress with the new covers today, despite making one big mistake. First I made a small cover for the pod nose and lower part of the screen, which turned out pretty well. As a result, I thought I was clever enough to work out the shape of a large single cover to enclose the cabin and cover the rest of the top half of the screen, but after marking and boldly cutting out a large chunk of tarpaulin which I thought would do the job, it turned out that I wasn’t 🙁

I’m not sure whether the material that I’ve cut will be totally wasted – probably not, but I’ll only get some small pieces out of it, like a prop cover and covers for the main undercarriage, I think. However, my trip up the learning curve wasn’t totally wasted, because as I did last night, I ended up enclosing the cabin with the small black tarpaulin that came ‘free’ with the main large one, and I can now see how it can easily be adapted to make a perfect cover for the cabin. So that will be my first job tomorrow.

I also made a ‘custom’ engine cover which I think will work pretty well. However, if I’ve got enough material over after I’ve made the tail ‘bag’ that I have in mind, I might re-make it a little larger to give more side protection. Even so, it should work pretty well as it is and will certainly be better than the old polythene sheet that I taped together last Autumn when the rains started and which has been the engine’s main protection ever since. No pics this time as I finished too late to take any.

So at the pace things are going, if my registration papers are turned round quickly by the DSAC at Merignac, I have high hopes of having the X-Air ready to fly over to Galinat in the coming week, after which I’ll be back to flying regularly. What a thought – I can hardly wait to be back flying my own aircraft after all this time 😀