So I went out to my hangar this morning to get some parts to bring home and work on. Turns out after the big weekend storm, my hangar is frozen shut. I have sliding, barn doors and the track is filled with frozen ice. That’s a frustration they don’t prepare you for in the airplane building books.

On a good note, I got shipping notice for my wings, fuselage, and replacement parts and the shipping is a fraction of what I was planning for. So no trip to Oregon needed. Van’s is using a different shipping company, which is a good thing for a lot of reasons (see earlier post about that!), and they are much cheaper. About a third of what I feared it would be. So for the first, and probably last, time in this build, something has come in seriously under budget. I should probably spend all that extra money on more tools, right?

Turns out once you get into the actual nitty gritty, riveting is about the last thing you do. This project is all about preparation to rivet, not the riveting itself. Not sure if that will hold true throughout, but that is what I am discovering so far. So I guess it is a relief that my rivet gun is held hostage by ice locks.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of going to Leadership Training for EAA in Oshkosh. If you have only been to Oshkosh for Airventure (like me), let me tell you, it looks nothing like that when it is empty. I could not figure out where anything was. It was so disconcerting. Talk about spatial disorientation!

Those people at EAA really know how to do it right. They put us up in the Air Academy Lodge, which is this gorgeous building. This is a meeting and dorm building used for kids camps and I think you can reserve rooms here for Airventure. Since we camp under the wing of the airplane, I had never been to this part of the field.

We started eating when we got there on Friday afternoon and did not stop until they gave us our box lunch and sent us off on Sunday. It was a great group of people from all over the country and I learned so much. All the little old guys in my EAA chapter better be ready because I have so many new things for them to do! They are such good sports and they do humor me. Being president of our chapter has been a great time for me. We will see if they all feel the same after they see all my new ideas!

The best part of the weekend would be hard to pinpoint. But I think getting to see this original RV-4 prototype in the EAA Museum was a definite highlight. Apparently Van didn’t consider a two-seat RV until he got married and then he built this one. That’s true love, because the inside of that plane is pretty small. We got after hours entry into the museum so we could take our time and see all the planes. And they opened up the wing that houses all of Paul Poberenzy’s papers and awards.

But maybe even better was during lunch when one of the other participants sat down at my lunch table and pulled out an envelope of $2 bills. He started folding and then presented us with origami $2 F-18s! Totally something to aspire to. I will treasure this little airplane! I have found a YouTube on how to make these, but I am not sure I am gong to try. I have enough airplane building going on already.

So I guess I will just have to enjoy my little paper airplane until it warms up a bit here. Or take a big pick axe out to the airport and chisel away the ice in my runners. But that is unlikely. I could hook up my heat gun to my air compressor and melt it all. But the compressor is in the hangar. Oh well, back to the day job to pay for all of this.

#flylikeagirl #womenbuildplanes #RV14 #vansaircraft