We arrived about 6pm on Friday evening and found that Mike from Upper Valley Aviation had already reassembled the control surfaces on the airplane! That saved me a couple of hours at least. Mike, Mariah and I spend about 3 hours on friday evening finishing up most of the reassembly. Saturday morning the weather in the Puget Sound was pretty ugly but not up in Canada so after filing my eAPIS to Tacoma Narrows I chased my tail trying to figure out how to modify it to allow me to land at Friday Harbor which I eventually did. After passing through customs I sat for about a half hour trying to get some idea of whether or not I could get back into KPLU. Since it was really iffy I decided to see if I could get a little closer to home just in case I had to have Amy come pick me up or spend another night in a hotel. Bremerton was IFR as was pretty much everything so I turned around and headed back North. I noticed that Paine airport was VFR and I knew that Chad would be out working on his airplane so I landed there to spend some time waiting out the weather. I had lunch with Chad but the Paine Aviation Day's annual event was going on so I also got to visit with Martin B who was demoing his VR setup.
Finally about 6pm on Saturday night KPLU was showing marginal VFR so I decided to file IFR home and go for it. The flight was pretty much uneventful and and even got some actual IFR time on approach. I landed, tucked the airplane into her newly remodeled home and went home myself...content.
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| The original concept...except with yellow instead of red |
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| One of the design options proposed by PlaneSchemer. |
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| An iteration of the design as it nears its final look. |
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| And the final design with paint colors and all views. |
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| Leaving for Canada with no paint. Picture courtesy of Jeff as usual (as are the next few) |
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| Disassembling the airplane for paint. |
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| A pile of parts that need paint. |
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| Final walk-around before we leave it behind. |
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| Progress at last!! It took about 6 weeks from delivery date to get to this point. |
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| Masking for the colors |
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| Red color applied. |
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| Control surfaces and other parts with red color applied. |
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| Blue applied |
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| blue on many of the "pieces" we removed for paint |
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| The lower cowling...the blue looks amazing! |
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| After landing and passing through customs at Friday Harbor. Finally back in the US! |
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| And here she sits safe and sound in her own home! |
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| The "Glamour Shot" taken by a photographer just before I departed Chilliwack BC. |
