294. Back in the shed

Ah, nostalgia! I’m spending a week with Theo working on 1264’s airframe. This morning we managed to manoeuvre the trailer into Theo’s drive and rolled the fuselage into the workshop just as the rain started to come down. The first thing we’ve noted is that there is a significant amount of dampness in the trailer, so this is an ideal opportunity to get things checked out and dried out.

The main job of the week is to try and some more dope onto the fuselage fabric. We have enough fabric to recover the fuselage, but the existing stuff has gone a rather attractive creamy colour in between the oil stains, and putting new fabric on would look very odd indeed, so we’ve decided to stick with the existing stuff, which more accurately represents 1264 as she would have been 100 years ago, but to try and get a finish that is easier to keep in its current state. You can get an idea of the change in colour of the fabric in the picture below. Where’s it’s been peeled back the inside is more or less the original colour.

But before we could start on that, we needed to open up the fabric at the tail, so that we could make a more airworthy job of the suspension on the tailskid. 

That’s all done and should be good for the foreseeable future. We also want to unravel the main suspension to see how that is looking; you may remember that the bungees had been divided neatly into about 12 pieces by the aluminium inserts which were intended to help them slide over one another. If it looks like it might happen again, we will try removing them.

It’s been great to have her back in the workshop again. Both Theo and I commented on the warm feeling we had to have her back at her birthplace.