Just screwing around

I officially start dreading winter on June 21st of each year, mostly because I have a thirty-five mile commute each way to and from the paying job, and nothing can mess up and already annoying drive like winter weather. But I also dread the onset of the latter half of the year because of the loss of evening light. Working under the single hangar light is a dreary, mood-sapping thing, and the encroaching shortened days are nothing that I look forward to with any sense of well-being.

So, this is the season of shortened work sessions on weeknights. It's bite-sized jobs I'm looking for this time of year, or larger jobs that can be sliced up into smaller segments. This job slicing is what I'm doing with the job of mounting of the canopy on the canopy frame.

I'm getting a little ahead of things, though. Before starting on the mounting of the canopy, Pete and I had to backtrack a little bit to finish the installation of the locating tabs that I failed to do before removing the frame for painting. It wasn't a particularly difficult job and wasn't too long before we were ready to start the canopy mounting.

Looking at the drawing in the plans, it looked like there were a dozen exotically nomenclated (why yes, I do believe I did just now invent that word) rivets, screws, nuts, and washers involved. In reality I think it was actually only three different types of rivets, but it was a somewhat daunting drawing nonetheless. In situations like this I often leverage my skills in the occult to divine the meaning buried in the hieroglyphs of the plans, usually through haruspicy (no, I didn't make that one up) but as luck would have it, the oftentimes over-industrious co-owner had accidentally disposed of the leftover chicken entrails that I had set aside for precisely this purpose.

I figured we'd just have to muddle through with whatever raw human intellect we could summon forth, but luck was on my side, albeit at first glance it seemed to be a misfortune. Having been somewhat careless in the setting down of the canopy frame on the workbench, I managed to spill my container of LP4-3 rivets. It only took a glance for me to see the power of the dark forces at work: it would be just like reading tea leaves:

It only took a few minutes of divination to figure out the solution to the rivet problem. As usual, the answer was.....

...let Pete figure it out.

While he busied himself with that, I installed the row of screws, washers, and locknuts across the aft bow of the frame.

This time of year is also a busy time for my other writing tasks as requests for game reviews start to pour in as the Christmas shopping season starts to wind up. It'll probably be a few days before we take the next bite out of the canopy work.