Scooby Webcam
I dont do my live webcam broadcasts anymore but I still do videos showing the progress on my airplane.
NOTE: there is no sound in the below video, click here for soundtrack and play them both simultaneously – have fun! (there was copyrighted music in the background)
Live broadcast where I answered people’s questions about my airplane:
In this video I iron the fuselage seams and heat shrinking the fabric, a very cool procedure.
Got the wings finished and am now working on the fuselage. I will also show you my panel and my oh-so-cool fuselage rotator. Progress has been slowed a bit because I’m working one handed:
Today is something really cool, rib-lacing! I’ve been looking forward to this for years. Find out what rib-lacing is, why its needed, and how to do it.
How it all got started:
I built this model airplane at age 7, it was a rubber powered plane. From there I moved on to larger rubber powered airplanes including the classic “Gollywock” till one day I lost a beautiful new plane in a thermal – it literally flew up, up and away. It was the ’70s then and remote control sets were just starting to become affordable so I moved up to remote control gliders so that I would never lose a plane again to a thermal.
Then I got the real airplane bug. My high school had an aviation class as an elective, it was basically a ground school class. After the class, I took and passed by written exam for the private pilots license. I then found a local Air Explorers post of the Boy Scouts of America where I was able to learn to fly for next to nothing. Our instructor Mr. Manning from the Navy volunteered his time to teach us and the planes were dirt cheap – it was pre oil embargo. Then flying got really expensive and I got busy so I stopped flying real planes for 25 years. Come 2001 I realized that I really, really wanted to build a plane. Not only just for the sheer joy of building but because of the cost savings. When you build your own plane, you are allowed to do the maintenance yourself which is *huge* cost savings so I figured it was the perfect solution for me. I started to build in 2001 and as I mentioned before, made a lot of progress until 2006 when all my spare time went into my fitness outreach activities. Its time to finish this puppy though if I am going to do it before I die :) Although the plane *looks* nearly complete, by work hours, its probably only 60% done. BTW, I still fly remote control gliders all the time!
