Slack Time – Part 1

There’s no doubt about it—this has been a strange winter. Here in northern Nevada, we have gotten weather (and snowfall) in the lee of the Sierra like we haven’t in years. It closed our airpark runway for almost a month because, well, we don’t usually get enough snow to justify buying a plow! When the runway did melt off, our taxiways were drifted or the weather wasn’t good enough to open the hangar doors. So I flew a total of 30 minutes in my own airplanes in January. Like I said, a strange winter!

So what about keeping busy in the shop? Well, our shop work is in transition. We managed to move the eXenos project into a neighbor’s hangar that was big enough for the 46+ foot wingspan before winter really descended—and finished assembly. The airplane was weighed, paperwork filled out and everything is ready for an airworthiness inspection (since completed). But arranging that with the holidays and a number of other constraints has been problematic. And, of course, the hangar isn’t being used for anything else and the ramp is in the shade so there is now a good foot of frozen slushy ice trapping the airplane until we get a good thaw. Even if we get the airworthiness certificate soon, it’ll be hurry up and wait….

So the shop is fairly empty, and we even cleaned things up—put away tools, resurfaced a workbench, sorted and stored a bunch of parts. But that just means that there really isn’t much to do between condition inspections on all five family airplanes. Those do come around!

But lest this sound like nothing but complaining, there is an advantage to “slack time.” It can be used for education (and recreation, I suppose). Everyone builds different skills in their lives and one of the skills I have missed along the way was welding. So that was on the list—picking up a multi-purpose welder and learning how to stick scrap metal together. It’s been a fun time learning how to MIG and TIG—a lot of random pieces of shop steel have been sacrificed in the pursuit of knowledge and skills. Lots of inadvertent holes have been burned into some pieces, but every day we get just a little better—and yesterday, I made my first actual “thing”—an adapter for my slide hammer that allows me to pull Lycoming case through-bolts. It could be prettier, but its functional!

Next time: fun with the lathe…