Today’s subject – ULMs

Hooray! At last! After the best part of a year – over a year for my French Weedhopper as I’ll explain in a moment – I’m back writing about and doing things to do with one of the subjects closest to my heart. And you have no idea what a relief that is as more than once over the past few months I’ve thought that this moment might never come. But enough of that!

And I’ve got my friend Wim to thank for it because with the weather forecast as being very bright but cold, he suggested that it would be a good time for us to go to Malbec and maybe run some engines. I thought that it would also give us an opportunity to do the work required on the Savannah before attaching the prop and making it flyable again, so I arrived a bit before our agreed time to open up the hangar ready to get going.

Here’s the sight that greeted me at Malbec – the airfield looking surprisingly spruce for the time of year, albeit with the windsock torn and needing replacing but in general not all that bad considering the amount of rain we’ve had lately.

However, the surface under foot and wheel was very wet – squelchy in fact – on the field itself right up to the hangar and just inside too where the rain had seeped into the ground, with the result that when we began working on the Savannah, our boots soon became caked in mud.

Before we started I checked on the X-Air, which looked just as I’d left it and I still don’t think that it will take much to get it ready for sale. In theory, it’s ready to fly now as I think that there should be enough fuel in the tank for at least an hour or so’s flying (after checking for water etc, of course).

But anyway, my first priority was to replace the two front bolts attaching the Savannah’s nose wheel fork to its nose leg so I can attach the tow bar crossbar that Victor made. But alas, it was not to be. Firstly, I’d cut the new bolts too short (in all fairness, I wasn’t well at the time) and secondly, the crossbar needed an arc ground out of its middle area to clear the nose leg.

So then we decided that if we pulled the Savannah out, it would be a good time to move the Weedhopper together with its wings and fittings over to the barn so the wings could be fitted. The ground outside the hangar was so soft that it was difficult enough pulling the Savannah out but even more difficult moving it back in because its wheels dug several centimetres into the mud.

But we succeeded and when we’d finished, the Savannah was finally alone in the hangar for the first time in many months. Before leaving it, I spun the engine a few times on the starter and after all this time, although it turned (without the prop fitted), it was sluggish and the battery will need a charge.

We had a go at fitting the Weedhopper’s left wing but we hadn’t planned for it and didn’t have everything we needed to complete the job properly. So we decided that the best thing would be to leave it until tomorrow and to then do just the one job.

The big problem is that the main pins that secure the wings to the fuselage are a devil to line up and this is not helped by their ends being almost totally square cut. This means that in order to insert them, the holes in the wing tubes and the fuselage brackets have to line up exactly and even if they’re only a half a millimeter out, you have no chance of getting the pins in.

The solution will be to very slightly file or grind the ends of the pins into a small taper so when the tips go into the bracket holes, they self-align, and Wim is going to do that tomorrow morning before we reconvene at Malbec in the afternoon.

But unlike the Savannah, after priming and spinning its 503 engine, it burst into life very readily. I was very pleasantly surprised because the battery that’s fitted was new in October 2016 when I finally finished the work on the Weedhopper, and although its engine was run a couple of times afterwards, the last time being March last year, the battery hasn’t been charged since October 2016. So well done Varta!

To finish off with, here are a couple of shots that I took of the Weedhopper before we pushed it into the barn next to the X-Air. There should be plenty of room in there for both aircraft even with the Weedhopper’s wings on.

I can’t wait to get back tomorrow and get the Weedhopper all in one piece. Although the runway will be too wet to taxy up and down on, just having the Weedhopper finished and ready to go (bar giving it a good clean) will be a highly significant moment for me given what has happened to me in the last year.

Sadly, after I’d started the Weedhopper’s engine, Wim pointed out a small tenant who had to be evicted. We had found what we thought was a bird’s nest in the engine cover that I’d put in place to keep muck off the engine but in fact it belonged to a little mouse who was awakened when the engine burst into life. Wim took him away and dropped him in the grass so I hope that he found another warm spot before it got cold again this evening. My bet is he’s now in among the hay bales in the other end of the barn 😉