sfGnome

What surprised me was the dude who was upside down in a burning plane, and still thought to pull out his phone and video the evacuation. Me, I’d be hot-footing to a suitable distance before even thinking “now, where’s my phone…”. 🫣

Thank you all for your comments thus far. I feel a bit like a kindergarten kid in a physics lecture, but I really appreciate all the info. 🙂

Whenever I ask questions about painting the plane, I get one of two answers. Either “Are you crazy? It always looks terrible if you do it yourself!”, or “No worries. You just incomprehensible the acronym, but don’t forget to farnarkle the fluglesproket”. Neither of these answers is particularly helpful, though there’s no doubt that the former scares me. So… I have a couple of questions for those of you who have actually done it. What spray equipment did you use (make and model please)? What paint (primer and top) did you use (again brand and type please. If I google ‘two pack’, I’m likely to end up with lots of references to dead rappers 😛). What environment did you do it in (backyard? Shed? Shed with extractor fan? etc) What would you do differently if you did it again? Would you ever do it again, or did it turn out to be just too painful? Part of me wants to be able to say I did everything in this build (the same part would prefer to spend money on the engine/avionics than on a painter), but the other part is terrified of getting in too deep and making a mess of what is really a very big investment.

It’s the old luck versus experience thing. I did good cross-country training, including real situations turning back when the weather was deteriorating. However, it still took a bit of get-there-itis on my part long after I had my certificate to teach me that it really isn’t worth the risk. I flew into worsening weather, and was lucky to turn it around without hitting the ground. Never again! That was the real learning experience, when you’re up there alone and suffering the results of your decisions. I’ll bet you that he was thinking the same things that I was; maybe I was lucky, maybe my extra experience to that date made me turn back just a fraction soon enough? Who knows, but one thing’s for certain. There are many things that might kill me, but flying into bad weather ain’t gunna be one of them (any more).

I’d forgotten how many stops planes used to have to make. And here was I complaining about having one stop between Oz and Europe. 😛

Therein lies the conundrum. If you get a store-bought plane, it all looks flash and, of course, you can’t change anything. If you build yourself, you have to trade off your ability to change things as often as you wish against your desire to make it look as store-bought as possible (for the psychological comfort of intending passengers if nothing else. There’s still plenty of folk whose concept of a home-built is that of a lawnmower engine strapped to a broomstick with some old sheets for wings 😱). That trade-off is, of course, a personal decision (and one that I have yet to make).

That is very neat. Does the laser engrave in to the paint surface, or just leave a stencil in the masking tape? That is, does the finished product leave the text rising above the base paint (where it could, over time, get rubbed off), or is the text set into the base paint so it’s somewhat protected?

May you and your floppy-eared dog remain fire free… My brother and sister both lost their farms in the Black Summer fires of 19/20. My brother rebuilt, my sister sold up, but the psychological scars remain for both.

1300HP! And here was I thinking that 130HP was impressive… 😝

Neat looking paint job!

Has anybody tried to read it? I was on about page 180 when I realised I was only about a third of the way through! if you have to memorise all of that to be able to fly in controlled airspace, then I think I’ll have to stay OCTA. 🫤

Big day! Well done. 👍

Yep. Years ago, while working for a reasonably large company, I hired a contractor to do some work which he didn’t do. When we refused to pay his invoice, he issued a winding up notice on the company. Needless to say, he didn’t get very far… 99% of winding up notices are meaningless. 🙄

Who know what changes CTA access will bring, but for OCTA, group G is the same as group A as far as medical is concerned - just self declared.

The stall will occur if the actuator can’t reach the limit switch for some reason (eg too much load).