Coming up on a year without a post… I now have a long backlog of stuff that’s happened that I’ll try to quickly go through. Starting with the big house project of 2025! The house we purchased when we moved to Sweden has a floor heating system driven by something I’d never encountered before: an …
The last post talked about dimpling, bending the sheet metal to fit a countersunk rivet. Its larger sibling is countersinking, which is used when the metal is too thick to allow dimpling. Countersinking is done with a countersinking tool, basically a drill with the correct angle and a pilot that holds it in the correct …
Some of the rivets used to assemble the Sling are counter-sunk, that is, they have a flat head that is flush with the skin of the aircraft. This has the advantage of giving the aircraft a more smooth appearance and also improving the air flow over the surface. Having a smooth surface is most important …
Once it became clear that building was going to take place in Sweden, I had to start educating myself on the difference between homebuilding an aircraft in Sweden vs. in the U.S. The legal requirements in the U.S are amazingly minimal. As long as at least 51% of the tasks have been completed by people …
Our new house has a very nice garage that measures 8.4m deep by 7.4m wide internally. This equates to a two-car garage with extra depth, not a ton of space. But because it was built to house machinery, it has 3.7m high ceilings and garage ports going up to that full height. As such, there’s …
It’s now 12 years since I first posted about airplane building and announced that I was going to build a Long-Ez. Since then, our life situation has changed considerably, we’ve moved across the world, received kids, changed jobs, and no plane building whatsoever has taken place… Once we had one kid and were thinking about …
We’d been planning the move from Hawaii to Sweden for a long time. Because the Swedish immigration authorities are ridiculously overburdened, the processing times for residency permits is counted in years, even if you’re married to a Swede who wants to move back home. There are entire web forums dedicated to the trials and tribulations …
Wow, that’s 18 months without an update. 2023 was pretty crazy. As I’m writing this update we’re living in a new house, in a new country, and I’m simply not going to be able to detail everything that’s happened. I’ll just give a quick summary. The last house-related update was posted in June of 2022, …
Over 2 years ago, when we got the minivan, I intended to upgrade its crappy halogen headlights. (In fact, I started planning this upgrade before we even got it, since I new the headlights were bad.) To be able to work on this while having a vehicle, I ordered two used headlights from ebay, and …
Besides the large living room, there was one easily sealed off part that also needed to be stripped and repainted: the (unused) foyer. The windows and windowsills here were also in bad shape externally, so that also needed fixing. We don’t actually use the foyer as an entrance (no one in Hawaii seems to, there’s …