So, building a airplane actually isn’t that hard. It’s strikingly similar to building a lego set, except with power tools, five times the amount of pieces , and, in our case, a professional telling what and how to do it. Also, your life depends on how well you fit the legos together. This sounds like a lot of hard work but it isn’t. The hardest part of building an airplane is the amount of time it takes. For instance, building and painting the rudder pedals took a day and a half. this usually stops pilots from finishing their build.
Having Mr. Rob there to help us saved tons of time. On top of not having to inventory the entire airplane’s parts, he helped us figure out the manual. I can not stress enough how much help this was. The inventory alone would have taken several days, and the manual skipped over some interesting parts, like how to install the rudder pedals. Mr. Rob also gave us advice on what to do with our airplane. For example, he gave suggestions on which avionics, aka flight instruments, to put in our plane.
Mr. Rob also kept us entertained. Apparently, like my dad, Mr. Rob knows everybody in his home town. We had constant visitors, ranging from his dad, who bought us lunch and had tons of interesting stories, to the owner of the largest trucking company on the east coast. They were all cool in one way or another. On top of all the guests, Mr. Rob had three dogs. Rudder, a old, brown bird dog who could barely hear, Birdie (I’m not sure how you spell it), a middle aged gray dog who looked like a good runner, and Banner, a cute puppy with one brilliantly blue eye and one blue and dark brown eye. Banner’s blue and brown eye gave him the appearance of winking at you. Both Rudder and Birdie were amazingly trained. Banner was as well trained as could be expected from a puppy. All in all, both the friends and the dogs provided an interesting and enjoyable break from work.
The dogs weren’t the only animals. Almost every night, one or two birds managed to penetrate the walls of the cabin we were staying in. Without fail, these birds provided comic relief as me or my dad tried to shoo them out of the house. These birds were fearless warriors and I had to dodge an attack more than once. However, it is normally whoever has the biggest stick who wins the wars. Since birds don’t have hands and me and my dad had a broom, we always won the frequent skirmishes.
The trip was loads of fun and I can’t wait to continue tomorrow.