April 23rd

I met Rick at the airport after work, and showed him the pre-flight for the Flightstar, then took him out for a bit to fly it.  I think it's going to take him a little while to get used to flying it, as he's obviously used to something with a much higher nose, so he defaults to ending up in a climb at a low power setting.  I showed him some turns and the wallow before a stall and then went back and landed.  Right now, he's buying it, and we're talking about me delivering it on Saturday afternoon / evening after the open hangar day presentation at the EAA, and the possible Vanagon meeting I had hoped to go to.  We'll see what the weather's doing at the weekend.

April 22nd

I spend the day just pottering about.  I did go to the airport to see a guy from Marysville who wants to buy the Flightstar, and we've agreed to test fly it tomorrow evening.  I'm looking forward to being able to fly when I want to, rather than after the worst of the thermal activity :o)

April 21st

I headed out to the airport via the bank, where I pulled out a cashier's cheque for the Magni.  At Lincoln, I gave the cheque to Ken, then watched the LRAA presentations in their annual meeting.  After that, we peered at the Magni to figure out how we're going to convert it over so I can fly it :o)  At the moment, it sounds like I'll have a foot brake, and a twist grip throttle, but that could change.  The Magni has a 1" stick, where the Flightstar has a 7/8" - the standard motorcycle stuff is 7/8", so we're going to move over to using that to make it easier to get parts and suchlike.

I tried bending the brackets for the headlight mounts for the van using a proper brake at the airport, but the first one cracked - seems that there are different grains in some aluminium, and if you go the wrong way, it can cause this sort of thing.  I'm going to try and get some more, better stuff and try again.

I took all of my easy to remove clutter out of the Flightstar, as it sounds like Ken might have already found a buyer for it.  I'll need tools to take the conversion stuff out, and I'll do that after I'm sure I don't need to demo fly it for anybody.

When I got home, I spent some time sorting out a couple of Google Groups to do the mailings for the EAA.  It'll manage subscriptions, and have a history, and hopefully stop us getting stuff labelled as spam.

April 19th

I took the day off, and we went over the the airport to throw Vic out of a perfectly good airplane.  She seemed to enjoy it, but I don't think it's something that she wants to do regularly.

When we got home, I managed to get the grass in the back garden cut, and rotated the wheels on the Jeep (for the first time in >10,000 miles - oops).

April 18th

I went over to the airport and cooked burgers and hot dogs before the meeting.  After the meeting, we ended up painting the whole hangar floor - we're looking at a few spots (like under the plane that's parked in there) on Saturday and we're done.

April 17th

I rode over to the airport to help get everything tidied up after painting the floor, for the meeting tomorrow night.  The paint looks to be pretty solid, so we're talking about getting some painting done after the meeting, then finishing up on Saturday.

April 15th

I've been taking to Ken about his gyroplane, as he's selling it because the insurance company won't let him train in it.  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense (other than the cost, obviously), so we made a deal and I'm going to be the owner of a Magni M-16 in the next few weeks.  He's taking the Flightstar in part exchange - he'll just sell it, but it means I don't have to sell it before taking the Magni.  It's been a stressful few days while I talk myself into it, but hopefully once I start flying it, everything'll be great and worthwhile.  Mid life crisis here I come.

Other than that, I tinkered around in the house, fixing the drain on the patio cover (I think the downspout was installed poorly, so I've cut the hole bigger), hopefully in time to see it rain this evening and see that it was worth it.  I did some more work on the headlight mountings for the van, so I'll need to get those bent up at some point.