{"id":12217,"date":"2016-10-26T22:44:45","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T21:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=12217"},"modified":"2016-10-26T23:10:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-26T22:10:49","slug":"have-wings-will-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/have-wings-will-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"Have wings – will fly"},"content":{"rendered":"

At least I hope so. But before I could start on its wings I had to uncover 28AAD and dry it down. It was another lovely day today but we’ve had a couple of wet days and nights and I could see when I peeped under the Weedhopper’s cover that it had had a good soaking despite being covered up.<\/p>\n

When I took the cover off, the aircraft looked as wet as if it had been standing out with no cover over it at all, so it appears that the tarp that I’ve been using has just about come to the end of its life. As well as being wet on the outside, the Weedhopper’s new screen and door plastics were also wet with condensation on the inside and it took me several minutes to go over the whole aircraft inside and out with a sponge and washleather.<\/p>\n

Then it was time to get all of the remaining Weedhopper items out of my ‘cave’ and laid out on the grass ready for me to start work assembling its wings. Sufficient wing battens had been marked up to make identification easy and here are some shots of everything set out ready to start on the first wing.<\/p>\n

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Although I’ve twice assembled the X-Air’s wings, which go together the same as those of the Weedhopper, this was the first time that I’d tackled the actual Weedhopper ones, so it took quite a while working out how to do the job properly and without doing any damage, to the wing covering especially. But I finally cracked it and here are some shots of the right wing.<\/p>\n

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I’ve had to leave the batten ends protruding for the time being as all of the end cords that you need to extract the battens have been removed and I’ll need to get hold of some suitable cord to replace them in the next day or so. Then it was time to tackle the left wing and once again I proved the effectiveness of the ‘learning curve’ theory, because whereas the first wing had taken a good couple of hours to do, I finished the second in about 30 minutes.<\/p>\n

So for the very first time since I’ve owned it, the Weedhopper’s identity was on display once again.<\/p>\n

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Here are some more shots of the finished wing. The cover didn’t pull up as tightly as the first one’s did but that won’t be a problem when the tensioning straps are applied when the wings are eventually mounted on the aircraft<\/p>\n

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So that was it. It had been a long day and there was nothing left other than to try to stow everything as securely as possible outside now, as I have no cover large enough to take the aircraft and its wings. So I did the same as when I’d assembled the X-Air’s wings and laid them together on the grass with a cover over them.<\/p>\n

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And the other bits and pieces, the struts and ailerons, I just laid on the ground under the aircraft, where there’ll have to stay until it can finally be assembled for weighing followed by taxi and flight testing, probably at the week-end or shortly after. Fortunately it appears that we can expect a period of pleasant dry weather in the meantime.<\/p>\n

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So that’s it for now. I was rather disappointed by how many dings and patches the wings had suffered under the stewardship of its previous owner(s) but there’s nothing much I can do about that, and they won’t look too bad when they’re mounted on the aircraft. While moving stuff from my ‘cave’, I came across enough bungie cord for the Weedhopper’s doors, so I’ll make the new straps up shortly.<\/p>\n

What is more problematic is that the top panel that goes between the wings has openings in it for the parachute that was previously on the aircraft and the exhaust support that was needed for the original 582 engine. I’ll have to think how best to fill them as although MYRO’s old cover was red, it wasn’t in very good condition. It might do while I fix the proper one, which I’ll probably do with velcroed on patches.<\/p>\n

But that’s for a bit later as tomorrow is time to get back onto the Savannah’s windscreen repair. And not a moment too soon either!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least I hope so. But before I could start on its wings I had to uncover 28AAD and dry it down. It was another lovely day today but we’ve had a couple of wet days and nights and I could see when I peeped under the Weedhopper’s cover that it had had a good … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12217"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12233,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12217\/revisions\/12233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}