Is this heaven? No, it’s Oshkosh…

My tent fits nicely behind the wing of my friend Jim’s RV-7.  Jim’s airplane has been a model for what we’re doing on the Mighty RV.

An original Mitsubishi A6M5 “Zero”…

…and its Allied opposite, an early Corsair.

Several balloons lit their burners while Chicago performed on Monday night.

On a whim I designed this T shirt logo…not terribly original, but motivational nonetheless. CustomInk did a nice job of screen printing them at a reasonable price for a very small order.

We took a little time off today to celebrate our national independence, and to watch the oldest commissioned warship in the world make one of her periodic turnaround cruises in Boston harbor.

USS Constitution (IX 21) was commissioned in 1797, and has been a museum ship since 1907.  She is periodically towed into the middle harbor where she salutes, and in turn is saluted by, Fort Independence.  She is then re-berthed in the opposite direction to spread the effects of weather evenly over the hull and rigging.

We watched the turnaround from a Boston harbor cruise boat.  Fortunately, it isn’t a dry ship…a cold Corona went down well for all three of us.

Constitution hasn’t been under sail since 2012.  Power for the turnaround cruise came from a tugboat.  There were a lot of other vessels escorting her into the harbor.

Even from a half-mile away, the powder charges were very loud!

One final picture with the tugboat on the other side…the Constitution is a beautiful ship!

We held our second annual summer fly-in today at the Plymouth, NH Municipal Airport (1P1).  1P1 is a beautiful 2,400 foot grass strip on the edge of the White Mountains; my mother- and father-in-law live a few miles away and we’ve been flying into the airport since the days of the Mighty Archer.  So when we went looking for a nice grass strip to share with our RV friends, 1P1 was a shoo-in.

We’ve had a lot of rain in the last week and I was slightly concerned that the field might be too damp for RVs, especially the nosedraggers.  But there was enough wind and sun today to dry everything nicely, and the field was in good shape.

In total we had seven RVs….

Ellen and I were too busy flinging burgers to get pictures of everyone as they arrived, but we did catch a few folks.  Here’s Andy and Allison from Hartford CT/Springfield MA…

Here’s Steve from Nashua, NH in his flawless RV-7…

Mike and Steve from Plymouth, MA in Mike’s soon-to-be-painted RV-8…

…and Vlad and friend Jeff, all the way from New Jersey via Delaware…

We also had Noah in his RV-7A and Dan and his wife in their RV-6A, both from Rhode Island, and Turbo Eddie joined us from Westfield, MA in his RV-6A.  We had a lot of folks from the local Plymouth area as well, including my mother- and father-in-law, who graciously lent us their cooler and grill stuff for the fly-in.

Andy has a GoPro HD camera, and mounted it on his RV for the return trip.  I’m looking forward to seeing the video.

And since we’ve just received the finish kit, we decided that this would be the official first fly-in for N701ED…

…just imagine that wheel pant being attached to a shiny new RV.

And last but certainly not least, huge thanks to Colin McIver, the Plymouth Municipal Airport manager, for letting us invade his airport for the day and mowing the runway just for us. Thanks Colin!

In the end, the fly-in was exactly what we hoped it would be – the chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones, share one of our favorite airports, and keep the motivational juices flowing on the Mighty RV.  It was an awesome day…

I had one of those milestone birthdays today, and Ellen and I had a wonderful day.

The night before, two of my co-workers snuck into my office and decorated it.  Thanks Mark and Matt!

Mark also brought in a cake with black frosting.  I didn’t know it was possible to make frosting black, but somehow Mark found a bakery that did it.  All I do know is that black frosting turns everything going through your lower digestive tract a bright shade of green, if you know what I mean, which was a bit of a shock on Thursday morning.

Van’s Aircraft likes to talk about the “RV Grin”…the smile we builders eventually have when we finally get to fly our RVs.  I got a chance to practice my grin today when I flew to lunch at New Bedford with my friend Tim in his beautiful RV-10.

Tim’s airplane is unique in a couple of ways.  First, it has a ballistic parachute recovery system integrated into the fuselage.  The fairings below and behind the cockpit windows house parachute risers that are attached to fittings on the main wing spar carrythrough.

The other novel aspect of Tim’s airplane is his Avidyne Entegra PFD and MFD.  I don’t know of any other RV (or any experimental airplane, for that matter) with Avidyne avionics…it’s a very nice addition.

I’m definitely smiling, and I think I caught Tim by surprise…but I’m sure he’s about to smile too.  Thanks for the ride, Tim…it was a great motivational boost!

While we’re motoring along on riveting, I’ll share a cool graphic I cobbed from Perihelion Design, who in turn snagged it from an old issue of Popular Mechanics.

I wonder when Garmin will start making cockpit pen plotters?

For the first time since migrating the site to WordPress, I checked the WP dashboard’s comment spam logs. Found some pretty good ones…

• “Your writing style is unquestionably impressive. Like Jd Sallinger.”

• “The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this 1. I mean, I know it was my selection to read, but I in fact thought youd have some thing interesting to say. All I hear is often a bunch of whining about something that you simply could fix for those who werent too busy seeking for attention.”

Ken Balch, “Captain John” Sannizzaro, and yours truly. As usual, I’m the only one not smiling. But it’s there on the inside. Really.

You may have seen Ken Balch’s beautiful RV-8 in Sport Aviation or on Doug Reeves’ website. Ken is also an EAA Tech Counselor and has very generously offered to act as my tech counselor for the Mighty RV. He stopped by today to take an initial look at my work on the horizontal and vertical stabs. Friend and fellow RV builder “Captain John” Sannizzaro also stopped by to meet Ken and to talk about all things RV. In the pic above are Ken, John and yours truly. As usual, I’m the only one not smiling. But it’s there on the inside. Really.

The verdict? Ken gave my work so far a thumbs up, which was good news. I guess I wasn’t really too concerned, but it’s nice to get another set of very experienced eyes on my work. Thanks again, Ken.

John brought his soon-to-be finished rudder for some additional questions.