All right, maybe its the fact that I have been on a rotating sleep shift for the past two weeks, working on mission time, without respect to day and night, but dang...I thought I was getting enough rest! Now this....
So I hitch a ride to Fort Worth this morning in a buddies Bonanza - it's OK, he has an RV-4 as well, but it was down for maintenance, so we figured we could squeeze into the Bo - to go pick up the Valkyrie from a couple of days finish-up work at Grady's shop. Since Grady's place was full of airplanes, the Val was sleeping safely with Danny King's "Beautiful Doll" and Doug Reeve's "Flash" a few hangars up the row. Little did I know that this place had magical properties...
While the work that Grady did was incredible, I was astounded to find something that was NOT on his list....The Valkyrie suffers from her ham-handed creator's careless moment with a disk sander, and has always borne some swirly scars along the bottom of the bubble, just above the canopy skirt. There are places, kids, where power sanders have no place to be, and this, I learned, is one! I always figured that with enough micro mesh and elbow grease, I could fix these blems, but just hadn't gotten around to it.
Imagine my amazement, then, when I closed the canopy for our flight home, and saw...NOTHING! No marks, no blems...even the couple of spots on the windshield were gone! The surfaces were completely transparent! That would have taken a human being hours to do, and here it was completed in the couple of days she was sitting there. I simple could not believe my eyes, and the Val even seemed to fly faster and more proud!
I am convinced that Doug and Danny must be living in an enchanted world, with fairies and elves that fix little defects like this - it must be the answer for how beautiful the Doll and Flash always look. It's got to be fairies I tell you....the thought of Danny King in pink tights, tutu, and carrying a little wand is to much to imagine without a couple of beers....
Danny, if you find those fairies, thank them profusely for me! Reward them with whatever they want, and put it on my tab (Hey, I've got a fuel receipt from the Blue Hangar Cafe for that gas-guzzling Bonanza that is more than 20 gallons that you can have!). Folks, the world just doesn't get much better than when RV folks are in it...
Paul
(Oh, needless to say, the Valkyrie was waiting at the gas pumps back home for the Bonanza to arrive from the trip back. Of course, the Bo was hauling all those empty seats around...Many thanks to RV-4 Driver Jeff Bertsch for the transportation!)
Plexiglas Fairies and the Magic Hangar....
Linear Mode
