It’s an ill wind

Or rather it was, that blew so hard one night recently that G-MYME, a pretty little blue AX3 that originally looked a lot like G-MZEL that’s shown in my pics of a couple of posts ago, ended up in a tree! Yes seriously 😯

But it was that same ill wind that did me an enormous favour, because poor MYME then eventually ended up in the hands of Mark Jones, the great bloke who runs Galaxy Microlights down in Wiltshire. As well as being a BMAA Inspector and experienced microlight engineer, one of the things that Mark also does is break damaged microlights for spares. It was Mark’s ad that I saw on Monday that I mentioned in my last post.

And so it was that this morning I decided to take the rest of the day off and drive down to Mark’s workshop which is in the Warminster area. I had definitely reserved all of MYME’s engine stuff (engine, gearbox, exhaust etc) but I wanted to see what else there was that I might be interested in. Rosie said that she’d like to have a wheel as a spare but unfortunately both of those had already been snapped up.

After the usual chit-chat and gossip, we dragged MYME (or what was left of her) out of the open-sided barn where she was being kept and into Mark’s workshop where we could get a good look at her and remove the bits that I wanted.

I wanted the instrument panel because, as can be seen in the earlier cockpit pics, MYRO’s had had a large rectangular area cut out at some time, probably for a GPS or something like that. MYME’s was relatively undamaged and putting that in instead would save repairing MYRO’s which would probably not look right afterwards anyway. Mark wanted to keep a couple of engine temp gauges but he kindly left the others in. After consulting Rosie on the mobile I thought it would be a good idea to remove the panel complete with wiring so I decided that in fact I’d take the whole of MYME’s wiring loom. So instead of just cutting it out, Mark carefully removed it. I also wanted the electric fuel pump so we left all the plastic pipes attached to that as well. I’ll show some pics in the next post of all the stuff I got from Mark, but here are some shots of poor MYME after we’d finished.

In these shots, we’d already removed the rear fuselage cover, from the cockpit back to the tail. Before we took it off, MYME looked quite ‘healthy’, but after we’d removed it, it was obvious that in fact she would never have flown again because her main top tube was distinctly banana shaped. Also. it was amazing how many bolts that we removed had been bent by the extraordinary forces that she’d been subjected to by being blown up into the tree!

What will probably be the last pics of MYME look a bit sad, but there you are, that’s life if you’re a microlight I guess. But the other side of the coin is that it’s because of what happened to poor MYME, good ole MYRO will be back in the skies again in all its glory in a few weeks or months time.

And thanks again to Mark Jones at Galaxy Microlights.