Meanwhile, I spent a bunch of time building machines and making stuff. I built a CNC laser cutter:
Then later burned my house down with it:
(I'm not sure why the board is rotating this image!)
I subsequently moved my machine shop down to the airport where the planes have been, picked up another hangar, and am living in an apartment on the airport.
I've been spending a lot of time helping other people with their projects, setting up my hangars, fixing up my Cherokee, etc. A friend at the airport is a bit of a biplane addict, and had six biplanes, two of which fly. One of them was a Pitts project which he had started years ago, but ran into some complications on and got distracted by other things (a story I know all too well!) He put it on barnstormers to sell it, and I decided to buy it from him.
It was a flying S1-C, built in the 70s I believe, and when he bought it he sold the wings and tore the fuselage down to metal, stripped and painted it, and rebuilt it as new. It has an AEIO-320 built by Carlos Gann, making about 175hp, that was pickled until last summer and hasn't really been run in yet. We've run it a bit on the ground. It has a fixed pitch sensenich prop, and almost all of the fwf, wiring, interior work is done, all it needs is a set of wings. He bought a raven wing kit years ago, and made a significant mistake building the wings, such that they were useless, and that was his demotivating factor.
Here's how it looked when I bought it (cowl is done as well but wasn't on in this picture):
I got it with almost everything I needed to complete it, including a full set of ribs already built up, flying wires, some of the aileron hinges (but not a full set, some are missing), bellcranks and pushrods, etc.
I've since made up the spars and put the wings together, and I'm to a point now where I'm working on getting it rigged and trammeled before starting to glue leading edges, wingwalk plywood, I-strut bay plywood, and tip sheeting on. I'm hoping to be able to have the wings ready to cover by April, and ideally I'd like to have it flying in time to make Oshkosh this year, as they're doing a special for the 70th anniversary of the Pitts S1 first flight!
In other news, I helped some other friends finish up an RV6 that they bought as a derelict subaru powered RV and converted into a proper lycoming machine, and I've been able to fly it some:
Also, the biplane nut who sold me the Pitts also has this, and we flew it some Saturday. I'm hoping to get checked out in it and be able to fly it myself before long! It's a PJ-260 with a 300hp lycoming radial:
