Someone recently asked me, "so how many hours a week do you volunteer in the shop?"
The answer is that I volunteer all my time: 40 hours a week. My full-time job is preparation for aviation ministry overseas where I'll be flying missionaries and their supplies in and out of remote locations, assisting in the spread of the Gospel.
With that said, let me share a little bit of what we've been doing this week (aside from waiting for our third child to be born).
In the above picture, you can see Compass' project 206 (that's pronounced "two-oh-six" not "two-hundred six"). What you can't see is all the sheet metal damage on the bottom of the plane. To access that more easily, we are going to rotate the plane on it's side as we drill out rivets and replace sheet-metal "skins". Hence why the plane is on stands.
However, to rotate the plane, the landing gear legs need to be off, and so I was tasked with removing the landing gear.
Our hope in this project is that as we remove components, we clean, inspect, prep, and reassemble so that when the time comes to put sub-assemblies back on the plane (for example, the nose gear assembly) it's completely ready to bolt back on the plane and we don't find ourselves months down the road wondering where all the small pieces are and why they're missing.
So removing the landing gear isn't just pulling them off the plane, but removing them, stripping the paint, doing a dye-penetrant inspection, cleaning, prepping for paint, and priming, and then reassembling.
So this past week, we found one good gear leg and one bad one (due to corrosion), and also figured out where to get a replacement heavy-duty nose gear fork to replace the one that snapped when the previous owner crash-landed the plane in the jungle.
Ah, all in a day's work. But it's so satisfying knowing that all of this work will provide Compass with a plane that will be entirely dedicated to training missionary pilots so that the Good News can be shared to every nation, every tribe, and every tongue.
The answer is that I volunteer all my time: 40 hours a week. My full-time job is preparation for aviation ministry overseas where I'll be flying missionaries and their supplies in and out of remote locations, assisting in the spread of the Gospel.
With that said, let me share a little bit of what we've been doing this week (aside from waiting for our third child to be born).
In the above picture, you can see Compass' project 206 (that's pronounced "two-oh-six" not "two-hundred six"). What you can't see is all the sheet metal damage on the bottom of the plane. To access that more easily, we are going to rotate the plane on it's side as we drill out rivets and replace sheet-metal "skins". Hence why the plane is on stands.
However, to rotate the plane, the landing gear legs need to be off, and so I was tasked with removing the landing gear.
Our hope in this project is that as we remove components, we clean, inspect, prep, and reassemble so that when the time comes to put sub-assemblies back on the plane (for example, the nose gear assembly) it's completely ready to bolt back on the plane and we don't find ourselves months down the road wondering where all the small pieces are and why they're missing.
So removing the landing gear isn't just pulling them off the plane, but removing them, stripping the paint, doing a dye-penetrant inspection, cleaning, prepping for paint, and priming, and then reassembling.
So this past week, we found one good gear leg and one bad one (due to corrosion), and also figured out where to get a replacement heavy-duty nose gear fork to replace the one that snapped when the previous owner crash-landed the plane in the jungle.
Ah, all in a day's work. But it's so satisfying knowing that all of this work will provide Compass with a plane that will be entirely dedicated to training missionary pilots so that the Good News can be shared to every nation, every tribe, and every tongue.
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