Christmas break/family vacay is over, So I headed down to the hangar this afternoon to spend some quality time with the project.

I had held off on installing the pitot mast and pitot tube because of the possibility of hitting it and bending something while the wings were off the airplane, but a loooong time ago I had match drilled the mast to the internal wing structure and skin. It was a simple matter to cleo it into place. Before I riveted it on, I did some simulations of the plumbing with scrap tubing to make sure I could fit everything in there with appropriate bends etc.

The mast is riveted to the adjacent rib with two LP-3 rivets, and up through the skin with MK-319-BS rivets. The 3 rivets that are common to the spar flange are solid driven rivets because I didn't want to unnecessarily upsize the holes in the spar flange to 7/64" to accommodate the MK rivets. It took a bit of maneuvering to get my tungsten bucking bar in there but overall wasn't too challenging.

I had previously pulled the nylon pitot and aoa lines from the wing root and was planning to get the plumbing done today as well, but that didn't happen. I prepped the fittings that will transition between the aluminum tubes from the pitot tube to the nylon lines, and also marked the minimum length for the aluminum lines coming off the heated pitot (8" per Garmin) in case I need to trim them down. The way it comes, the longer tube is pitot and the shorter one is AOA, but I also wrote on them with sharpie just in case I cut them off and so they don't get crossed up during installation. Before going any further, decided to take a break for a cup of coffee.

At the line shack, I bumped into another airport tenant named Wayne who has a C150, and we were looking at an RV8 at the gas pumps when the owner showed up. It turned out to be a guy I knew back in the day at Cessna (Fred Leeper) who had popped in from his backyard strip a few mile away to fuel up. While we were talking, another old Cessna acquaintance showed up (Brian Van Dyke). Brian jumped ship years ago and is now flying a Lear for Koch out of ICT. I hadn't seen either one of those guys for probably 10-15 years and it was nice to catch up.

Brian hangars his Bonanza across the runway in Gary Drummond's hangar. Gary is another old acquaintance from Cessna Flight Test who has an RV8 on the field. I'm not sure how many Rv's are actually based down at K50, but it has to be at least 1/2 dozen. Really cool.

I asked Fred who he used for the AW inspection for his RV8 and he told me that he didn't use a DAR, but instead just went with the Wichita FSDO. The inspector he got was Rick Stevens. Fred told me that it was a straightforward process so I'll likely just do the same thing.

While we were catching up, Greg Thomas, one of the owners of the airport, rolled up with a reporter from the Wichita Business Journal who was doing a story on airport revitalization and general aviation. She wanted a couple of pictures of Fred's RV8 and ended up taking a couple of pictures of my hangar/airplane factory as well.

By the time all that was said and done, I was out of time, so that's how a 30 minute project turned into 4 hours.

I hadn't considered it before the move, but when I was in the garage, I could work uninterrupted all day long. Now that I'm at the airport, it seems like pretty much every day I'm meeting somebody new or bumping into old friends. It's not the most efficient way to build an airplane, but I'm really enjoying it, especially when I bump into somebody I used to work with but haven't seen for years.