There was a long list of things that needed to be done to Melmoth 2 before leaving for Oshkosh. One was to get a coat of paint onto the airplane. This I barely managed to accomplish in time, using roller, brush and a marine paint formulated for sailboats being finished, I suppose, at the ends of Alaskan docks, remote from air compressors. This type of paint flows out amazingly smooth, as though sprayed, if you apply it just right. I managed to do so in some places and not in others, but the result didn't look too bad, on the whole, if you stood far enough away.
I luckily found, as the day of departure approached, that I could delete things from the to-do list without actually doing them. This discovery sped my progress considerably.
I didn't get under way until Wednesday afternoon, July 30th, and had to telescope the acceptance test-the airplane had not been in the air for 10 weeks-and the departure for Oshkosh into a single flight. Nothing untoward happened, however, until I encountered a squall line east of Flagstaff and landed at Winslow a few minutes ahead of a black wall of monsoon wind and rain.
Unfortunately, I had no tiedowns. There are threaded sockets in the wings and tail, and I had bolts to screw into them, but I had never drilled the holes or added the loops of cable that were intended to make the bolts into removable tiedown rings and jack points. As the storm approached, however, I found myself quaffing the milk of human kindness in a way that was to happen several times during this trip. The lineman drilled holes through two of the bolts for me, and we sat under the wings as the wind began to whip up and the rain to slice down, threading loop after loop of safety wire through them until we judged the resulting rings to be sufficiently strong. When we returned, rain-soaked, to the office and I tried to pay him for his work, he declined, and instead gave me and the occupants of another stymied Oshkosh-bound homebuilt a car in which to drive to a motel.
The next day, the next difficulty. Having launched just before sunrise, I was enjoying the sight of blurry streams of heated air emerging from the cooling air outlets on the top of the cowling, and made visible by a sliver of rising sun when the engine gave a slight shudder. I switched first to one mag, then to the other. The engine ran smoothly on the left, but shook and backfired on the right.
I was just coming up on Gallup, New Mexico, but a friend was supposed to meet me in Santa Fe, 45 minutes ahead. Reviewing in my mind the countless Aftermath columns I have written about pilots who made bad inflight decisions, and weighing convenience against the odds-rather hard to measure, but in any case slight-of the second mag giving up within the next hour, I decided to continue. Indeed, I reached Santa Fe without further trouble.
