It’s not how you start…

It’s how you finish, and after a rather frustrating day, I was treated to a pleasant surprise as it drew towards a close. I struggled for almost the whole day working on the X-Air’s new covers. I thought that they’d be a piece of cake after all the work I did before, cutting and stitching MYRO’s covers, but it appears that I was mistaken. Having bought an enormous heavyweight black PVC tarpaulin to make them out of, I thought that all I’d have to do was cut out each cover, turn the edges over once to give a double thickness in which to put the brass eyelets and just cement the turn-over with the special PVC adhesive that I’d got from the UK. The stuff is called HH-66 and it came as being THE glue for PVC sheeting.

But either my tarp isn’t made from PVC or there’s more to it than I thought, because getting the stuff to stick has been a nightmare. I haven’t even got one wing cover done yet and the edges I have managed to turn over don’t look as though they’ll last five minutes if put under any stress. As a back-up, I got my old Singer sewing machine out and found that despite the thickness, it stitches through the tarp easily enough, so once I’ve got all of the edges turned over and stuck down, I’ll be able to run along them and reinforce the joint with a line of stitching, which will actually make a very good job out of it. However, that’ll take a lot of time and all the while I have no covers, I can’t take the X-Air over to Galinat and start flying it 😐

We had a thunderstorm last night with quite large hail stones and fortunately I’d completely covered the X-Air temporarily with the black tarp and although there is no more extreme weather forecast for at least a couple of days, having cut up the tarp I’d used previously for the second wing cover, I needed to find something to do the job tonight. That’s when I got the idea of trying the covers I’d made for MYRO for size, and I was gobsmacked and pleasantly surprised to find that they actually fitted extremely well! So good in fact, that I’ll be able to use what I already have temporarily at Galinat and all I’ll need to do before taking the X-Air over is make a secure cover for the pod and cabin. That shouldn’t take too long as I’ll be able to adapt the small tarp that I used last night, and as I probably won’t have my registration papers back from the DSAC for the X-Air that will allow me to fly it, until the middle of next week, I should have plenty of time to do that. Here are some pics I took this evening with the X-Air in MYRO’s covers.

I’ll still continue making the covers I originally planned from the black tarp, just in case I can’t get a hangar up before the Winter, but I think MYRO’s covers will do very well for now, and using them will also take a bit of pressure off me. Oh, BTW, the revolving door I mentioned in my last post revolved yet again almost straight away, and my friend who arrived on Wednesday from the UK to stay for a few days had to go straight back the following day, for personal reasons. So sad as that was, at least now I’ll be able to concentrate my attentions exclusively on the X-Air 😉