Sunday, May 24, 2009

The Mouse?......

An update for any animal lovers out there, the mouse survived.

The cat flushed the vicious little bastard out from its cover. With two grown adults armed with thick towels and an excited pursuit cat managed to corner the snarling angry rodent. Not kidding the mouse had guts and was not going to be taken without a fight!

It all ended well with the mouse last seen bounding over blades of grass heading for the horizon. Probably ends up being lunch for a local owl?

Time to bring the Blog up todate ;-)

Geeeesh,  I have no idea how others manage to run and keep up to date posts on their blogs. Seems to me there are far more important things to do?

Well, it's early in the morning,  our Cat got me up by banging around our Mansfield shack looking for a mouse that she had dragged up from the basement.  Don't know if she found it yet but its keeping her busy. Sooooo, since I'm up I might as well address my dead blog.....

Between my last post and now, we had Winter.  Not much for flying (a few trips out on the paraglider just to get out).  We managed a few wonderful days snowboarding but never managed to do our trip to Whistler to visit old friends and put in a few Peak to Creek runs.

Mia returned to the Netherlands for her brothers birthday and got in some classic Dutch skating. They had great winter weather for skating, one of the skating treks was 30+km's, another was a 20km OR with Pub set up out on the ice. After all, if your going to put sharp metal blades on your feet, you might as well drink?

Back home I was stuck with the "projects".

The ATOS VR had a rib problem that needed repair. Seems, baking in the hot Washington sun had caused 1/2 the ribs to develop a case of the "bends" . Some were out as much 1/2". After a few letters to the factory I ended up building my own parts curing oven. After a few hours at 50-55C  and some weight I was able to get them straightened out.

Next up was a complete re+re of the velcro on Mia's VS. To take this project on I had to purchase a sail makers machine. After doing a bunch of searching I came across a nice old Pfaff  138 for $800 and it worked perfectly.  Of course Mia's VS was only one of my sail projects,  I updated the tip velcro on my VR and well not planned the owner of my old C managed to twist my arm and ended up getting a full velcro upgrade. Last sewing project was to make Mia a new glider bag, again the zig zag Pfaff did a great job.

Before the sewing projects came to an end, I managed one more "should get to it project".  It is amazing what you can find when you go searching....  The project: Building a "Flow-Form" tow line recovery kite.  Thing is, all the commercially available kites are not that well built (and we should know, we've killed many a kite out in sage!).  Well digging around on the net I came accros a link to an Excel formula that helped me scale a perfect, stable wing (just got it tested yesterday in real life conditions... it is the best chute that I have ever used).

Here is the link to the program:

http://www.hprinzler.de/ff03a2.zip
or you can go to the following site and download it yourself:
http://www.hprinzler.de/index_e.htm

Now, last obligation for winter was the promise to several people regarding a detailed video on our towing system. I suck at this video stuff but did manage to put together something that would upload to Google:

 

Yah, I ain't no Martin Scorsese... but I was able to check this project off my "things to do list".

Now.... its back to flying! More to follow.....

Cheers

Martin