This week.

As you all can see, I was allowed to put my TV and sound system back up this week. It is great to have it back. Mostly because of the sound system. I like to have music playing while I am working.

This picture is of a cabin door on a Black Hawk. You may abe asking what the Duct Tape is for. Well, these doors are made of Kevlar and Fiber Glass. The pilots had, throught very rough use, put a hole throught the door. Due to time restrictions, I was not allowed to bring the door into my shop, so I had to repair it on the aircraft. Well, as you all know, a composite repair needs to have constant, even pressure on it while it cures for the repair to work. Since I had no way of clamping the pressure plates to the door, I had to use a bag of rivets as a raised point, and wrap tape aound the door to apply pressure to the bag. The pressure was then distribuited by the pressure plates. In the end, the door turned out great.

The above three pictures are of a particularly cool repair. For OPSEC reasons, all I can say it there was a hole put in the aircraft. The bottom picture is what the hole looked like after I chain drilled it. As you can see, I drew a box around the damage. This box will be the size of the hole when I am done. You want to remove all the damage, and get yourself a symetrical shape to work with. This way, making the filler and patch (Top Picture), will be a lot easier. The middle picture is the hole after I cleaned all the damage out. The top picture is the filler, or the piece that is doing to go inside the hole, and the patch that will cover the whole repair. As you can see in the bottom picture, the damage occured close to an already existing rivet pattern. The tricky part is working that rivet pattern into my repair. This one was simple for the type of repair it was, but still a good challange. Both repairs were done by me in less than 24 hours. I am given a VERY short amount of time becuause the aircraft cannot be down for long. I have spent many late nights (Sometimes as late as midnight) and early mornings (2 hours earlier than normal) at the shop to get it all done.