I'm at it again....

At last year's Tandem Wing fly-in Spud and Doug conspired and put a price on my head. They each offered to put up $100 to anyone, in the tandem wing class, who could post a faster performance run than I could.

What did I do to deserve that?

Anyhoo, life's circumstances have made it possible to fool around with the plane for a year, so I decided I might as well jump in with both feet. Here is the first go-around of year's project list:

• Install new, stronger, rear wing. With the help of Paul & Roy Fisher and Charley Rodriguez I had made a new wing about three years ago and never got around to installing it.
• Install electronic fuel injection and ignition, treading the trail that Lynn French blazed.
• Build a new instrument panel, featuring a Dynon FlightDECK D-180
• Aerodynamic clean-up including; new canard fillets, clean-up wheel pants, lengthen engine cowling 2 inches, low profile oil sump, and other items such as fixing canopy gaps.
  

For Christmas, Sandy offered me either a new interior or a new canopy (the old one had a crack in it). I took the canopy.

So, where was all this work to be done, here in the southern Illinois winter? Out of the blue, John Cotter offered my a small plot of real estate in the Southern Illinois University's Aviation Technologies hangar! The best of all worlds; heat, light, and daily trash removal.

So, a couple of weeks before Christmas I moved into my winter home and pulled out the Sawzall.

This is really going to be a lot of work, but it is all fun. I think Spud & Doug ought to offer their bounty to me.