A fresh perspective

Still no weather conducive to flying - it appears this drought of acceptable aviating weather may last longer than our current national nightmare which is, of course, the Hollywood writers strike. How we'll survive without fresh and new episodes of the dreck that passes for TV these days is simply beyond me. Well, the gusty, low cloud conditions can't last forever, so I went out to the hangar to day to prepare for the next chance to fly that comes along. There were a couple of little maintenance items to take care of, and I was really keen on trying out the fantastic little Bogen-Manfrotto clamp/head that I bought to mount a camera in the airplane. I suspect it will be primarily used to support the camcorder, although it is strong enough to hold the still camera too.

I picked a location right between the seats. The articulated head will allow for a straight ahead view, or off to either side. It won't be all that easy to adjust in flight, but nor will it be impossible to do so:





Here's some teaser video:



It's a little depressing - even a nice mount can't compensate for my camcorder being pretty crappy. Unless $750 for a nice Canon HV-20 HD Camcorder drops out of the sky and beans me on the noggin, though, that's a situation that's unlikely to improve. I know, whine whine whine.

That snippet of a Lancair Legacy taking the runway was a guy in the hangar across from mine that just finished building and was on his way for a test flight. It wasn't first flight, but it was definitely on of the first few. Avidyne panel, huge engine. Wow!

Since I had the Olympus out anyway and they were so darned colorful, I also took a shot of our front yard pear trees:



Also tried out the new flash unit on Brave Sir Hogarth. As you can imagine, he hated it:



And, as long as I was just hanging around the house, I started on the epoxy skim coat on the kayak. This time the epoxy goes on with a foam roller, and is then "topped out" with a foam brush. Once this coat is on, it will get lightly sanded with 220 grit paper, and then varnished: