Progress!

[Ironflight]

It has been a tough week in the homebuilding community - we have all been affected by the loss of Jeremy, each in our own way. I got to know him through meetings at OSH and then through lots of email as we worked towards me flying the Subsonex this spring. He will be sorely missed - along with the growing list of friends I have lost in experimental aviation and aerospace operations over my lifetime. I have learned through experience that one of the best ways to honor the legacy of such a man is to continue on with their work - and we will continue to build our Xenos in his memory.

I know that I have been a bit remiss in posting about our Xenos project the past few months - but that doesn't mean we haven't been making some progress - it just means that I am too busy! Louise and I picked up another project, along with a partner early this year, and we have been putting a lot of time into that - a Dream Tundra bush plane. That is located at another Airpark near us, so we go down and work on it a few hours at a time. The Xenos gets worked on at home, anytime we have a few minutes to run out to the shop and make a part, or do some assembly. And, of course, we have testing projects for other people, the magazine, and companies to keep us busy.

But....today we have a fuselage box!



There are a few more fasteners to put in at this stage, but it is mostly self-supporting, and ready for us to move on to interior cockpit parts building. So far, everything is still fitting together well, and boy - pulled rivets sure do make the job go quickly! We had to come up with a clever sequence of movement to support the tailcone upside down on the edge of the table in order to easily work on the cockpit sides and bottom (we build a little shelf of plywood and rested the big cross-bar on that), but overall, assembly has been without incident. We're going to continue to leave the tailcone bottom skin clecoed for now, but I look forward to once again working with it right-side-up and building out cockpit fittings - working towards getting it on the gear so we can roll it into a corner and get to other things - like wings!


Paul

[Bryan Cotton]

Paul, good to see your latest picture. Looks like progress!