Political leanings

As the never-ending campaign season takes a few months off before the beginning of the 2012 cycle, we can finally get back into a little normalcy for awhile. I can turn on the radio now and get back to hating the commercials that were supplanted by endless campaign commercials that I hated even more. Incessant lies, half-truths, and fabricated accusations of the most outlandish personality traits of any given political opponent have been replaced with self-important political analysts spewing forth endless words intended to tell us all why we voted as we did. Of the two, I find the latter even more annoying than the former. The one I hear the most is that at its very core, America is politically oriented to the right of center.

I'm here to tell you that they may just be onto something. Allow me to explain.

I somehow convinced Co-pilot Egg to join me in the hangar this morning to do a little work on the airplane. I'm starting to work on all of the stuff that will sit in between the upper firewall and the control panel. There are a half dozen or so parts that need to be separated into left and right halves and buffed up on the ScotchBrite wheel. Perfect work for her. I told her to be sure to dress warmly as the thermometer was reading in the low- to mid-30's.

She snuck that beanie out of the house while I wasn't looking.

Getting the parts ready took about an hour. That was just enough time to start getting cold and hungry, so we took a lunch break. One thing led to another and it was 4:30 in the afternoon before I got back out there to do some more work. I had a couple of parts to fabricate. Well, "fabricate" is a bit ostentatious; I really just needed to trim some angle aluminum to the correct length and drill some holes in it. Piece of cake.

Here you can see how carefully and precisely I marked the spots to be drilled.

I clamped down the angle and drilled the holes.

And here it is, my evidence that everything in this country is right of center:

There's no fixing that. That hole has to be just right. A bolt is going to go through that hole to act as a hinge for the canopy, and having the hole off center like that would cause all kinds of problems. I had to order more of the aluminum angle from Van's. It was something like $3.43 for eight inches of it, which will give me four more tries at getting it right. Not that big of a deal, but the shipping will probably be at least $10.

I was pretty disgusted with myself. After all, I've been working on this thing for more than a year; you'd think I could drill a hole by now. I shared my tale of woe with Kyle (back-up vocals and roadie for The Jackson Two) who replied that he too had made the same mistake. I figured that what I had done wrong was to drill the larger hole all at once. Even with the spot punched with a center-punch, the big bit still 'walked' as I was drilling. It would have been better to have started with a smaller pilot hole. When I asked Kyle what he had done differently the second time he tried it, he said pretty much the same thing. So there you are: the secret to success is to center-punch and use a pilot hole.

In theory, anyway.