Painful day

I just wish now that I’d never bothered fitting the electric start to the engine on Friday. It’ll be some time yet before I fit the engine so it wasn’t a job I had to do, but it severely messed up this past weekend. Sure enough, I woke up on Sunday still with a lot of discomfort in my back and having had two consecutive nights of badly disrupted sleep, so there was little chance of me getting much done on MYRO. Naturally the weather was perfect – sunny, not too hot, not too cool and just a light breeze. Just my luck – but I couldn’t let the weekend pass by without doing something.

Obviously I couldn’t do anything too heavy, and even bending over to pick anything up was very painful. That meant, of course, that almost everything I handled I dropped and then had to pick up again 😕

Everything I did was slow but by the end of the day I had managed to get a fair bit done. The starboard undercarriage drag link had been replaced at some time in the past and was still black, so I took it off and painted it white. Then I removed the nose wheel assembly and as well as cleaning everything up, removing some light corrosion from and painting the two small dampers and painting the fork tubes, while I had the wheel out, I also removed the bearings and re-packed them with fresh grease. So that was good 🙂

Unfortunately, when I refitted the nose wheel assembly I found that because the pod is not fully supported with the screen not being in place, it had dropped a bit and the edge of my nicely repaired and resculpted pod nose wheel hole had beem nipped by the steering stop when the wheel had been turned. This had slightly damaged one edge. When I lifted the pod and supported it from the fuselage top tube with string, it was well clear of the steering stop but by then it was too late. So it could have been avoided – I’ll know next time I fit an AX3 pod! The damage is only slight and could be left but as it’s fairly accessible with MYRO tilted back I’ll probably see if I can repair it again.

So the day ended up being far from a total loss, which is more than could be said for my back. With all the bending I had to do, it ended up very painful indeed and I couldn’t wait to get into a long hot shower.