Not Much Time Lately

Spring and Summer start filling up the schedule and life starts getting in the way a little bit.

I’m doing a crazy bicycle ride on June 11th that is 134 miles long and 8000′ of climbing. I’ve been spending as much time as I can training for that, which has taken up several hours each weekend. Also last weekend we had lots of people over the house to celebrate Greek Easter. So between that, and my drain plug in my compressor failing, yet again… I didn’t get much done the last couple of weekends. Additionally, we’ll be away 2 weekends in May.

My compressor is only about 2 years old, and the original drain plug bolt snapped in half right at the hole that’s drilled through it.

Last weekend after draining the tank and starting it back up again, air was leaking out of the drain still. After investigating and unintentionally unscrewing the bolt all the way out of the drain plug (that’s not supposed to happen) and having the bolt shoot out of the drain in a big burst of air… I found that there is no o-ring present anymore which is letting air leak by. So I went out and bought a brass elbow, extension rod, and a ball valve shutoff to make draining the tank easier to get to, and a more reliable mechanism.

I debated putting an automatic drain i, but I’m also having thoughts of upgrading to a 60 gallon 2-stage compressor too. So that will wait.

I’ve spent what time I’ve had working on getting the nose ribs and inspar ribs all match drilled to the front spar and fabricating cradles to hold the assembly for final drilling and riveting. I decided to try straps for the cradles instead of making them rigid after seeing what Jason Ellis did. The cradle doesn’t influence the shape at all, it’s simply a method to hold things up while working on the HS. The straps also allow a little bit of movement, if needed.