Quelle surprise! Suddenly now very warm…

The rain did eventually stop and the mist eventually disappeared but before starting serious work on the X-Air I thought that I should finish off a couple of jobs around the house that I’ve been meaning to get done for some time. I went across to the Brico Depot at Perigueux on Saturday but as it was raining, half of the population of the surrounding area had decided to go there too! So as the place was so packed out that you could hardly move, when I found out that I had to go outside (into the rain…) to buy the bags of ready-to-use concrete that I wanted, I decided to call it a day and come home 😐

I went back again on Monday and got everything that I needed. The first job was to dig a hole and put up the rotary clothes dryer that I’ve had for several weeks now and it was while I was digging the hole for it yesterday that I realised that I was becoming rather hot. Not to put too fine a point on it, after a while the sweat was just running off me, and not surprising really because when I checked my car temperature gauge, it read 27.5 deg C!

But anyway, I got the job done and the base tube of the clothes dryer concreted neatly into my back lawn so I then went on to work on my front lights. When I came here there was one bare bulb hanging out of the wall on wires near my kitchen door that worked from a switch in the kitchen and another light that was all corroded away further along the front of the house that I assumed worked from another switch in my lounge. A little while ago I put a rather nice outside light on the wall connected to the wires near the kitchen door and I recently put up another to replace the corroded one. Sure enough, that worked from the other switch as I’d expected and I was never very happy about that. So I’d bought a length of cable on Monday and yesterday I fitted a junction box under the eaves and ran the cable down so both of the existing lights worked off the same switch, the one in the lounge. And I’d also run another length of cable from the junction box along to the other corner of the house so I’d then be able to have three lights all working together equally spaced along the front of the building.

Because the walls of the house are of stone and are very irregular, I’d had to put a kind of solid flat mortar pad on the wall to mount the last light on using some of my concrete with the largest stones removed and when this morning I found that it and the base I’d mounted the clothes dryer in were rock solid, I pressed on to finish putting up the third light. Once again, after a while it began to get pretty hot, but this time not as hot as yesterday – my car temperature gauge this time only read 26.5 deg C! But still hot enough to be working outside in, I can tell you 🙂

Here are a couple of pics I took just as the daylight was beginning to fade this evening. I like the effect – I think it makes the place far more homely.

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So then I could start on the X-Air. As I need to get hold of new cables for the elevator trim and brakes, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get much done on the main fuselage, so rather than remove the covers that I have on it, I thought I’d have a go at putting a wing together. I have two sets of tubes and covers but I thought that I’d do the ones that were on the aircraft when I originally saw it in Brittany as it certainly flew OK then. I laid a large tarpaulin out on my back lawn to assemble the wing on and it turned out that the one I grabbed first was the left one. The wing tubes are assembled and the covers fitted in a similar way to the AX3 so this wasn’t totally new territory for me. If anything, the X-Air’s are easier to do but the heat didn’t help matters 🙂

I found that although the bracing cables are in good condition, the outer plastic sleeves are damaged and a bit tatty so I swapped one from one of the spare wing tubes. I also found that when they’d disassembled the wings, they’d forced a bolt head against the upper fabric surface from the inside, which had put a small tear in it, but I pressed on anyway thinking that I’d just have to put a little adhesive patch on it when I’d finished. After much heaving and sweating I finally came to attach the bracing cable to the in-board end of the leading edge and at that point I noticed that the main attachment hole was slightly ovaled. I know that this was the tube that was fitted to the aircraft when I flew it and when I went to check the other leading edge tube, that was also slightly ovaled, so not good. However, when I checked the two spare leading edges, I found that they were in perfect shape, so not a disaster after all! All I need to do is swap the tubes around – after all, no point having good spares if you then don’t use them, and the chance of needing spares anyway is pretty remote.

So that’s what I’ve decided I’ll do. I’ll also replace the four wing bracing cables at the same time and while I’m doing it, I’ll get hold of a whole load of stainless steel bolts, nuts and washers and replace the existing ones as I go. At least now I’m in France I can just source high quality ones myself and not have to pay over the odds for the same, or possibly inferior ones, from the ‘manufacturer’ as I would have had to do in the UK. I’ve now got to order all the stuff I need and wait for it to be delivered so the job will take a bit longer, probably, than I’d originally planned. But I think it’ll work out better and once all the nuts and bolts have been replaced, they’ll never need doing again, not while I have the aircraft anyway. So tomorrow I’ll need to put together a list of everything I need – and take the wing I put together today, apart again. I’ll have to do that because it was too big to go through the door of my ‘cave’ and it’s now lying outside on the grass under the tarpaulin. But at least while I’m doing it, it’s not forecast to be quite as hot tomorrow as it was today 😉