Daily Musings .. nothing important

[bkervaski]

Well, it appears in addition to being a gymnast to build an RV you also need to be good at crossfit .. I'm sore as can be today from getting my wheel pants done yesterday. A constant drop, mount, mark, unmount, hop up, sand, repeat countless times for 10 hours

Also, I have a video camera setup to automatically activate when I walk in the shop to record my progress .. on more than a few nights I've been woken up at all hours by the compressor I forgot to turn off and have had to go down and shut it off .. hopefully dressed .. sometimes not .. sorry for whoever watches those videos and catches me stumbling in half or mostly naked

[Mark Dickens]

The physical impact of one of these builds doesn't get a lot of attention, but it can be significant depending on your age and physical shape. In addition to the pains you mention, I have a chronic case of tendonitis from years of hand work, cleco pliers, etc. Not to mention the blood I've left on different parts over the years from cutting myself. I used to tell my wife that if I wasn't bleeding when I left the workshop, it wasn't a good work session

[TS Flightlines]

its the education and recreation thingy. I guess the recreation is the workout you get during construction.

Tom

[XOverZero]

There's recreation??!!

[upperdeck]

Numerous times, I've substituted my airplane factory episodes as my workout at the gym!

[Veetail88]

My worst moments were when I was building the baggage door on my 8. You have to strap the door down tight to the fuselage and crawl under the instrument panel to drill and cleco the thing together, and then again to install the rivets. Well the problem is, I'm a good sized guy (Mostly around the middle ) and I had to lay everything I needed on the floor right behind the firewall, then wriggle my hulk in, face up and arms above my head as there would be no re-positioning my arms after I was poked up in the nose; the gear towers being extremely limiting. Add to that the fact that the crotch strap mount is poking up from the wing spar. I put some foam and blankets in there to cushion it, but that sucker poked me seriously in the back the whole time!

So there I was, squirming on my back, arms extended forward over my head, strap mount digging into my back yelling "ow, ow, ow, mother &*%#@)&^!", all alone in the hanger, in the winter, and the heat is set to kick off at 9 PM! I truly thought I was just going to lay there, stuck, and freeze to death! My wife would have eventually missed me and tried my cell phone, but I couldn't have reached it in my pocket if I wanted to! Wouldn't have been a pretty picture with the EMS folks there sometime in the middle of the night, prying my fat, half frozen, rigor mortise stiffened magnificence out of that fuselage!

Yeah, that was my worst build moment!

[RVbySDI]

Originally Posted by Veetail88

My worst moments were when I was building the baggage door on my 8. You have to strap the door down tight to the fuselage and crawl under the instrument panel to drill and cleco the thing together, and then again to install the rivets. Well the problem is, I'm a good sized guy (Mostly around the middle ) and I had to lay everything I needed on the floor right behind the firewall, then wriggle my hulk in, face up and arms above my head as there would be no re-positioning my arms after I was poked up in the nose; the gear towers being extremely limiting. Add to that the fact that the crotch strap mount is poking up from the wing spar. I put some foam and blankets in there to cushion it, but that sucker poked me seriously in the back the whole time!

So there I was, squirming on my back, arms extended forward over my head, strap mount digging into my back yelling "ow, ow, ow, mother &*%#@)&^!", all alone in the hanger, in the winter, and the heat is set to kick off at 9 PM! I truly thought I was just going to lay there, stuck, and freeze to death! My wife would have eventually missed me and tried my cell phone, but I couldn't have reached it in my pocket if I wanted to! Wouldn't have been a pretty picture with the EMS folks there sometime in the middle of the night, prying my fat, half frozen, rigor mortise stiffened magnificence out of that fuselage!

Yeah, that was my worst build moment!

To borrow from Larry the Cable Guy, "I don't care who you are, that there is funny!"

So, there must be a story in there about how you finally did get out!

[KRviator]

Originally Posted by bkervaski

Well, it appears in addition to being a gymnast to build an RV you also need to be good at crossfit .. I'm sore as can be today from getting my wheel pants done yesterday. A constant drop, mount, mark, unmount, hop up, sand, repeat countless times for 10 hours

Been there, done that. And after all that work, I have discovered one of my wheel pants is skewed and I'm half-a-ball out in the cruise. I flew without (wheel) pants last week and could fly feet on the floor for the first time in 18 months.

[DanH]

The baggage door is ****, but the -8 pays back at wheelpant time:

[vic syracuse]

Wait until you crawl back into the tail cone of a nose gear RV to replace an ADAHRS unit and forget to put a saw horse under the fuselage. Now you have to crawl UP, in reverse, with your arms above your head and no way to get them down.

Vic