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No, I haven’t been kicked out of the house though at $120 a month for a 1000 sq ft place it would be a steal to live in (though I would soon get tired of having no water I suppose), but the plane building project has graduated from garage to hangar. The fuselage kit is coming in a week and there just isn’t room to continue in the house.

So we loaded the wings on a trailer

Drove it to the hangar

Put one on a bench to work on, the other in the stand

So now we have completed the tail (shown here)

the rudder, some slats, some flaperons and about 90% of two wings.

As usual, you can keep up with all the plane building at http://www.stol750project.info/

I enjoy posting on Twitter and, although one shouldn’t microblog for the attention, it is nice when someone responds to something. I have a small group of 6 or 7 people who regularly say something to me and I appreciate the sense of community that brings. But 90% of my followers never say a word to me so I wonder why do they follow me at all?

A lot of these people are pilots so surely they’d be interested in my aviation related tweets? But no, my ten year pilot anniversary got not a single congrats, I toured the largest ATC facility in the world and no one was interested. Same with my plane building updates.

If I take a look at some of my pilot “buddies” I find comments about a pretty bird on a Cessna windshield gets a conversation of 20 tweets, an “I’m washing the plane” gets a load more.

So today I’m unfollowing a lot of people who don’t care what I write. It seems kind of petty but I don’t need to feel like the unwanted leper (are there wanted lepers??) online as well as in the “real” world.

It isn’t my intention for this blog to become a highlight reel for my plane building blog but I thought I’d share the latest piece that I completed: the horizontal stabiliser on the tail.

Almost time to order the wings.

Took a short flight last week and if by some chance you don’t subscribe to my flying blog, friend me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter and missed it, here it is. Next flight I’ll get the camera mount sorted out so I don’t have to do it by hand.

I suspect that most of you aren’t following along with my plane building log so I thought I would report on passing our first (or maybe that is second?) milestone: completion of the slats.

The slats attach to the front of each wing and serve to allow the plane to fly at much slower speeds without stalling. This gives us the plane’s impressive (100ft) takeoff and landing distances. There are actually only two slats, when the wings are complete we will join pairs of slats together to form just one on each side. Now that the slats are complete, we have started on the flaperons.

You can see all the slats related pictures on the Flickr set but here are a few to give you a flavour.