More Garage than You can Stand

Finally finishing up with the garage. We have a couple more shelves to put up before I’d declare it “finished”. I’m also looking for some kind of rack to put Cheryl’s kayak on, so it’s not in the way when it’s not being worked on (and, when it gets finished, it’ll need a place to live). If anyone has any suggestions ..

This weekend (and most of last week) I worked on getting protective epoxy coat on the floor. I probably spent more time on it than necessary, but it turned out pretty nice. Since the floor was a mismatch of different concrete slabs, I thought this would a) make it look a lot nicer, and b) be super cool to have. I mean, all the “serious” mechanics and tinkerers have something like this, right? Right! I ended up using a water based epoxy from a company called UCoatIt.

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One thing I knew but never really realized: when you epoxy the floor, you really are just painting it. It’s not like it’s some thick coat that’ll hide all of the cracks. Think of how thick paint goes on your average wall and that’s about as much epoxy/paint that gets on your garage floor. Don’t get me wrong, it came out great but it would require you to fill in cracks and sand away rough spots if you didn’t want them to show.

On to the next topic .. Cheryl’s garden is very nice this year. Here’s a couple of pics from it:

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Now that the garage is done, hopefully I can make some leeway on my airplane. It’s been sitting for quite awhile as we waiting for this garage to get finished up. I have a whole fuselage kit just sitting there, begging to be opened let alone worked on.

Flordia 2006

We had headed down to Flordia earlier in April to visit with some friends (Hi Jeannie and Tony!) and check out the area (I’ve never been there except to hop on the cruise ship). We had a great time and got to enjoy the nice warm Flordian weather. Sea kayaking was pretty fun, but we need to practice our coordination in a 2 person kayak. I couldn’t tell if we were fighting each other or the current.

The day before we left (a Monday) we headed to the Sun N Fun fly-in at Lakeland, FL. It’s not too far from St Petersburg and since it was mid-day there was hardly any traffic. Unfortunately, it was the very last day of the show and all of the vendors/displays were itching to pack up and go home. We did get to browse around and see most of the vendors I was interesting in seeing. I was a little bummed there was nothing going on at the Van’s Aircraft booth but I did get to meet Jan of Eggenfellner Aircraft.

We took some pictures, but as there wasn’t much going on (though the airshow was still cool, even if it was shorter than the other airshows during the previous week) we didn’t get very many. I will say, it’s hard to get a nice crisp shot when you are zoomed in at 300mm. Now I know I need to increase my shutter speed a bit to make them crisper – I was trying to blur the prop (instead of having the photo freeze the prop) and had adjusted my shutter speed down. That works great for airplanes that are closer but not for ones that require full zoom.

Here’s a couple OK ones, there’s more (maybe not OK but alright) photos in the gallery:

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Since then we’ve been busy getting the garage ready. I finally got some shelves up and have started organizing. We got a couple nifty organizer items from a line of products called Gladiator GarageWorks – we picked these up at Sears. I’d really like to start working on my airplane again, and I’m really close. We’ve got two benches built (thanks Ross!) and now just need to finish up our shelving.

I’m also finishing up school for the semester, so I’ve got to study this week for my finals. I have my flight sim class final on Thursday the 4th, but it shouldn’t be too rough – I just need to finish my preflight planning and make sure all the t’s are crossed and the i’s dotted. My weather class (which is an online class) has it’s final exam on the 12th and 13th so I’ll be studying for that most of the coming week. I’ve enjoyed my flight class as I’ve been able to do some more advanced stuff (things I haven’t learned through my Flight Instructor yet) but the weather class is boring me to tears. Weather theory is just a buncha random variables all thrown into the wind and seeing how they fall.. voi la! There’s your weather.

Speaking of instructors, I’ve got (again) a new instructor. Ryan will be starting me on my instrument training shortly, so hopefully he’ll be around to finish it! My previous instructor, Kyle, has gotten a job flying turbo-props – so congrats to him and good luck!

Letsee, what else can I talk about. Oh, I finally finished Fallen Dragon by Peter F Hamilton. It’s a pretty good sci-fi book even if he does ramble on quite a bit in his flashbacks. Now I’m reading The Assassins by Oliver North which my mother gave me for Christmas (or my birthday, one of those).

That’s all I got, for now. I should get back to work.

Late night post

Hi everyone,

It’s the eve of our wedding day, and I haven’t gone to bed yet. I had decided to play around with the photo gallery and I’ve settled on one called Coppermine. It seems to work well enough and there’s a nifty one-click insert picture plugin for WordPress. Lets give it a shot:

That’s Roomba, our new best friend. He cleans the floors for us. The cats seem the like him more than anyone else – they’ll follow him around and make sure he does a good job. Keeps them entertained for hours.

We’ve also made great progress on our garage. Old:
And new, almost done-ish:
This drag/drop interface for pictures sure is spiffy. The popups aren’t working, so you can find a closer look at the gallery: gallery.7mph.com

Anyways, I should head to bed.. big day tomorrow!

Home Improvement

We’ve decided to upgrade some things in the house, and we just got the first one completed this weekend.

Our old water heater:
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Our spankin’ new water heater:
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Our new hot water heater is a Rinnai tankless water heater which provides endless hot water and (supposedly) uses less gas than a normal tank.

In two weeks we get our gas stove installed (in our fireplace), and our contractor should be starting our new garage around then as well. We’re also suppose to be placing the windows in one of the rooms (large, old windows that aren’t double paned and cracked in a few spots – we hope it helps keep the house warmer!), but dealing with Lowe’s hasn’t gone very well. I’d much rather have our contractor do it but we’ve already agreed to have Lowe’s come out and install them.

I’ve made some good progress on my RV-7A (make sure you check out my Builder’s Log) and have decided to put down the $250 deposit required to secure a delivery position for an Eggenfellner Subaru 3.0 H6 engine. After reading lots and watching the video of Tom Moore’s Subaru-running RV-7A, it looks like a great option!

Yay for new toys (even if some of them are for the house)!

I’m also happy to report that I got an ‘A’ in my very first back-to-school class, AES 1100, Aviation Fundamentals. I wish I knew what score I got on my final, I think I’ll email the professor and ask… . I just got the books for my classes next semester which is ACC 1010 (Account for Non-Business Majors), AES1400 (Aviation Weather), and AES1710 (Flight Simulator Lab). Both the accounting class and the weather class are done online, I only need to go to campus twice a week for the Flight Sim lab. I figured I’d try the online classes and if I wasn’t following the accounting class well enough, I would ask for an Incomplete and do the class the old fashioned way.

So lots of fun stuff going on. Now if I could only find a way to buy one of those hangars out at Front Range Airport…

IM Blog Notification

Can someone try this and let me know if it works or not? If it does, I’ll put a more permanent link somewhere.