Day 4 - Wednesday 31st July

The day started out much the same as the previous two - early breakfast, a chat with some new people and then across to the air show.  My plan for the day included completing the wood building (a wing rib) course and staying on for the night show.

On arrival at the show ground I made my way down some 'new' streets towards the wood centre . . . places are strictly limited but I managed to secure one.  The lecture was quite interesting and informative about various glues and adhesive techniques - and building the rib itself was quite a simple process of cutting and inserting strips of wood into a jig and glueing and stapling collars onto the joints.  The whole thing was flipped and then the other side done in the same way and the finished rib stored for drying - you come back at another time during the show to remove the staples and sand the whole rib.  So that worked out pretty well.

And so it was time to visit my new friends in the Continental Motors hospitality tent . . . what a pleasure it is to sit in comfortable surroundings chatting about flying with a complete stranger!

My task for the afternoon was to complete composite course - which I did.  This meant sitting through lecture (with a different person this time, thank goodness).  I think I did best of all with this class . . . fundamentally it is a matter of mixing EXACTLY the right about of glues and resin, laying down layers cloth over another material (such as honeycomb) and getting EXACTLY the right amount of mixtures on each layer.

Again, the idea was to make up the sample and leave them there to cure and come back the next day for collection.

The air show itself got a bit interesting because a big storm was brewing - the wind was backing around and spots of rain starting to fall.  Eventually they called off the air show because of the threats of thunderstorms - which did not eventuate, but I suppose they cannot be too cautious at a huge public event like this.

I made my way to the last part of a metal fabrication demonstration - a really old bloke who had been building planes for years was doing some really interesting things.  And he was very generous with his explanations and time - a lot of us stayed back much later than the scheduled finishing time.

There was a band on between 6:30pm and 8:30pm, the scheduled starting time for the night air show.  I went along and listened for a while but they were pretty underwhelming so I went for a bit of a wander around a couple of the big pavilions.

The air show itself was brought forward to 7:30pm . . . which absolutely marvelous fora number of reasons.  First, night air are tedious (once it is dark).  Second, the light was gorgeous - the weather had passed to the and late afternoon sun contrasted the aircraft agains the preceding dark clouds.  And last, it finished much earlier.

So I made my way back to the university again . . . thus ending another day.