http://eaavintage.org/2019-airventure-awards/2019-classic-awards/
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to chat at OSH this year. I flew in on Tuesday to miss the air traffic peak and, as it turned out missed the dreadful weather that caused some problems.
It was a great week culminating in the the unexpected honour of CF-CLR winning the Gold Lindy, Grand Champion Classic Aircraft. My thanks to the judges and all the other VAA volunteers for their hard work, and congratulations to all the other award winners and participants.
One thing I was not happy with last year was how the plating had turned out on things like the cowl latches and stabilizer flying wire components. The objective was to achieve a light, mat gunmetal finish emulating the white cadmium that was likely there from the factory. What I ended up with was much brighter and too shinny. I removed these parts with the intention of stripping and re-plating but decided to try a light blast with aluminium oxide. This did the trick so the fix was easier than I thought, and made a bigger difference than I anticipated, so happy with the result.
Perhaps the most significant task was to create a "restoration book." How do you condense five years of work into an informative but brief document that will hold the attention of the reader? The answer is you spend many hours sifting through photos, a blog in my case, and various on-line and other historical reference sources, patch it all together and then spend many more hours editing and summarizing!
I started with my home printer and a three ring binder, but ended up using an on-line photo-book app. It took them three tries to print it correctly so I'm glad I started the project early (December).
I am happy with the result. It is 11'x 17" and there's likely still too much detail included but it was clear at OSH that the book is a great conversation starter, which is the best possible outcome. Here is is in micro:
