Since the early years of my involvement in ballooning i have had a strange fascination with home building. Thinking of it now it was probably due to the fact that 30,000 is a unworldly amount of money for me and building an aircraft with my own two hands sounds like a hugely rewarding experience with the added benefits of it being a lot  cheaper and learning a new skill set.

Since the discovery of Chinese “made to order” fabric by Tem Smith my hopes of building my own balloon, spreading my wings and not relying on the generous people around me to gift me time in their balloons has become a plausible option due to being a student.

In my breaks from class I have been working trying to raise enough money to start the venture into the exciting world of home-building an XLTA aircraft. I remember a speech by al pachino in the movie “Any Given Sunday” he talks about life being a game of inches and how all those inches accumulate. This was very much the case when referring to saving. That extra shift moved me closer to the chance to work a little more too eventually put me into the sky.

Since early May I have been spending endless hours on the internet finding parts or useful tools to purchase when I had the funds to do so. Going into the project I planned to build my funds up then going on a buying spree after the fabric had arrived but reality stepped in and I couldn’t resist buying some pieces of the puzzle to keep my motivation going, some of these items included thread, an electric cutter and sewing machine.

The sewing machine I bought was a Juki LH-515 through a friend of my girlfriend’s father. I had no idea of its history besides the usual observations of age, surface rust being one of those characteristics (This is where buying the machine months prior to the big adventure had paid off). The sewing machine lasted about 10 minutes in the garage before me and Katie started cleaning/pulling it apart ready for a dose of “Elbow Grease”.

Elbow Grease:

•          Sewing machine service
•          Replace foot pedal brace
•          Frame reinforcement
•          Frame strip and paint
•          Replace all frame nuts & bolts
•          Replace all table screws

The first step was using a grinder with a wire brush disk to remove the paint and surface rust. With help from my dad I managed to get all parts of the frame stripped and coated in rust remover just to ensure the frame was rid of rust.