Before we get to airplane activities, I have to share the photo journal from the trip I made to the Great Darke County Fair with Co-pilot Egg. Despite the vampire-like hours she's keeping these days, I was able to rouse her from bed at the unbelievably-early-to-her but it's-about-darn-time-to-me hour of 9am to prepare for our journey westward. We would be travelling with lovely Silky (I've had to change the name of the car from Silke to Silky since so very few people are familiar with the German name Silke) and that's always a draw for Egg - she really likes that car!
It helped, I suppose, that I was going to let her drive for a little while.
Note the white knuckle death grip on the wheel - she's not taking any chances with Dad's car!
Back when I was a kid, we'd go to the fair every year. I've tapered off quite a bit in the intervening 40+ years - I go maybe once every four years now. While the nature of the overall fair hasn't changed (rides, food, home improvement vendors, tractors and farm equipment displays, and animal barns), the ratios between those have altered a great deal. Plus, there is the introduction of a rather disturbing sign of the times: you can now pay a few bucks to sit in a dark trailer playing video games.
Another sign of the zeitgeist is the incredible expansion in food options (and the size of the buyers) and the number of food vendors. They continue to find new things to deep fry, and what used to be a couple or three rows of food is now a 'food court' that inhabits fully seventy percent of all available space on the fairgrounds.
Which is not all bad. I haven't been able to find deep fried cheese curds since the first time I went to Oshkosh. These days, they aren't even available there. The EAA has become a highly commercialized, money-seeking organization that has gone very far down the path of abandoning the grass roots support that breathed life into it decades ago in favor of attracting (and fleecing) the general public. Part of that change was the awarding (for a goodly fee, I would guess) exclusive concession rights to one vendor. That caused the almost complete homogenization of food offerings, and the demise of the specialties such as fried cheese curds.
Egg is a huge fan of the curds and sniffed this trailer out almost immediately. As I like to say, where there's a curd there's a whey.
I generally skip right on by the home improvement stuff since it's usually just gutter shields or roof shingles, but this little oasis caught my eye. The little water fall that feeds the wading pool where the chaise lounges are sitting is something I could really get behind for the palatial mansion. If, that is, the part of the west 40 where it would have to be positioned wasn't already dedicated to providing a canine latrine. Oh well.
Egg likes feeding things, and things like get demonstrably excited about being fed are the best. These little birds went into a frenzy!
We finally worked our way to my favorite section: the machinery! Most of the farm implements have been replaced by quad runners, some of which are now as large as small pickup trucks, but there is still room for some of the historic tractors that I like so much. Egg, being 1) a teenager, and 2) related to me, found a lot to comment on in the name of this particular manufacturer. She apparently didn't get it all out of her system at once - she also had some comments about the large rooster we saw later in the poultry barn.
If you haven't seen Egg lately, you might be surprised - she has gotten wheely tall!
I'm always amazed at the various things that rodeo competitors will herd:
We walked through the floral competition barn. There too I was surprised at some of the things that were being judged. This is an entire row of the top winners in the 'Leaf' competition:
I didn't agree with the judges' decisions in every case, but I had no reason to disagree with whichever judge decided which flower should take fourth place:
We made our way to the goat barn. Egg could have opted to feed a goat for $1 back where she had decided to feed the little birds, but apparently she knew that you can do it for free in the stock barns:
This is my favorite barn. I view it as the first step of the bacon assembly line.
Coming attraction out of Hollywood: The Hangover, Part IV:
We stayed (mostly out of the same innate curiosity that attracts people to train wrecks) for the pig showing competition:
Not sure what's going on here since I didn't see the foul, but I think he's asking for a ruling from the replay booth:
This one really made me laugh out loud. It's a huge grill where they were cooking up hundreds of ribeye steaks, positioned right outside the cattle show. I kept thinking they would starting hawking "Get your losers! We have fresh losers right here! Get 'em while they're fresh!! Chow down on fresh loser for just $8.95!"
Ahh, just a few more weeks until football starts. In the meantime, there's always the horseshoe tournament.
Okay, that's it for the county fair. Back to what (some of) you came for: the airplane work. In a nutshell, the TSA phase is completed and I am entering the PSBT (Putting Shi..., uh, stuff Back Together) stage. The supports that I took out and tossed in the scrap box are replaced with new ones. It's all nutplates now, which will come in convenient... never. But they sure would have been convenient on the old parts!
The supports for the wire bundles used to be held in with two rivets, but now they want three. Piece of cake, right? Just match drill that new hole. Yeah? Well tell me how I'm supposed to get a drill bit anywhere near that hole!
This is where David Dangerously comes in. You see, there's an older, easily forgettable movie called Johnny Dangerously. It's a spoof of the 1930's gangster movies that I'm such a fan of. There are one or two memorable moments in the movie, one of which is when an over-the-top tough-guy character threatens to shoot Johnny with his Magnum 88:
What reminded me of this was the way that I came up with to drill that peskily inaccessible hole: I pulled out the #88 bit:
It was simply pulling LP4-3 rivets after that.
There were also a few more holes to be drilled. These go up on the spine of the fuselage and will be used to attach the mounting brackets for the air data computer.
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