HP-24 Project

Update 23 October 2008: Red sky at night

Well, I finally got around to collecting some photos off of the camera, they stretch all the way back to when I did the last Update.

Next week we have Brad and Doug in the shop to make Brad's horizontal stabilizer, to make a set of lower wing skins, and also to do some tuning on the upper wing molds. I'm taking vacation days Thursday and Friday to join them.

Here's the photos:

Taken 26 September, my new Dodge Neon rental car, as-purchased. It was quite a runaround getting all the paperwork together; Brigitta did all the legwork on that.

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With the 205/45-16 tires on cheap 16x7 alloy wheels.

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Rather a bit of extra room there, I should have gone with 205/50-16 tires. Oh well, the Eibach lowering springs take care of most of that.

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Taken 27 September at the annual Yosemite Facelift, where the Yosemite Climbing Association gets together, puts on the orange vests and picks up trash in the park. I ditched pickup duty on Saturday afternooon and scrambled up Sunnyside Bench Regular Route with Ishun, a friend from the climbing gym in Fremont I go to. Sunday was a full day of pickup.

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Taken 5 October out at Air Sailing where Raen and I took rides (separately) in the ASK-21. Raen liked it, and I stayed up for about an hour and a half, my best October flight ever.

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My nephew Cameron tries out the front seat of the 21.

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11 October, back in the shop for another day of ironmongery. Here I'm starting to weld up the fixture that locates the spar butt in the upper right wing mold.

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Almost done, with the arms for the lift pin locating bushings in place. There's no precise way of welding stuff like this, so what I did was to use oversize tubing and just get as close as practical. Later I'll pot in close-tolerance locating bushings using a flox/epoxy mix.

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The two locating fixtures finished.

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Brigitta scheduled us for camping in Yosemite on 18/19 October many months ago, and so we did. It's become a family tradition to spend as much of early October as we can in the park, it's so beautiful then. Saturday we arrived noonish and took a leisurely walk from the Yosemite Village area over to the base of El Capitan where I wanted to scope out some of the short routes at the base of the Nose. That and back is about six miles of walking. We camped the night in Upper Pines, and Sunday Alia took an Alpine start to beat the crowds on Munginella, a 3-pitch (2 if you stretch it) 5.6 Yosemite classic. Here's Alia approaching the top of the first pitch. There was one party ahead of us, and one behind.

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Raen does some bouldering near Lower Yosemite Falls.

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Taken 23 October, three photos of Brad's canopy transparency installation. He's bonded the transparency to the frame.

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Three photos of the control stick in place under the knee hump.

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Next Update should have many photos of big glider parts, with lots of carbony goodness.

Homebuilt aviation is not for folks who don't try things at home.

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page updated 23 October 2008 all text and graphics copyright (c) 2008 HP Aircraft, LLC