Flying our Cardinal south for its new plumage - Long report

Rick and I flew our Cardinal south for a paint job with AOGPaint in
Mena, Arkansas last Sunday. The $6K saving and the opportunity to gain
some long cross-country instrument flying experience was definitely
worth the hassle.

"Hassle"? How is it that we all love to fly, but a long cross-country
is viewed as a "hassle"?

:-)

http://nwanews.com/story.php?paper=a...storyid=130462
http://www.kait8.com/Global/story.asp?S=3930004

That's cool! That's exactly what we need next to the inn!

The trickiest part is a slight dent in the left
aileron. One previous paint shop had offered to smooth it out with
bondo. Another insisted a re-skin. Dennis told us that he would not
bondo a control surface and too much shaping of the dent area may
damage it to the point of having to re-skin. So we told him just do as
much as he can.

I'm surprised to hear that anyone would offer to bondo a control
surface. That's pretty dangerous, messing with the aerodynamic balance
of an aileron.

We had one re-skinned on our old Warrior (it was crinkled pretty badly
when we bought it) after someone here mentioned how flutter can happen
at any time, without warning, and is usually catastrophic. It can be
fine 999 flights in a row, and then just depart the airframe on the
thousandth flight...

It cost over $1000 to re-skin, but I felt a lot better about flying the
plane when it was done.

I preferred the Holiday Inn Express over Days Inn but it did not have any
vacancies.

shudder Things have to get pretty awful to actually "prefer" a
H.I.E. They are the biggest rip-off in the industry!

The Days Inn was as budget as one could get snip

At least Days Inns are exactly what they advertise: Cheap lodging. No
surprises, no regrets.

It was a successful trip. We got our plane delivered. We could
hardly wait to see our bird in its new plumage in a month.

Great story, Hai. I'm looking forward to the next chapter! (And I
hope it's not a "horror story" like so many "I had my plane painted"
posts have been...)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"