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We spent the last several days of this week in Toronto, as Terry had a convention to attend. It made a nice break from Ottawa. The hard drive in my laptop died the night before we left, so there was a big panic the next morning to purchase a replacement hard drive, and perform the surgery to replace it. The old hard drive had been making strange noises for awhile, so I was expecting it to fail at some point, and had been making daily backups. So I didn't lose anything of importance, just a few hours time.

I've been slowly working down the list of snags. But I'm adding new ones to the list about as fast as I cross old ones off. It has finally warmed up a bit, so I've also done a few rounds of fill and sand on the various fibreglas parts.

The last really big job I need to do before taking the aircraft to the paint shop (other than finishing the fibreglas) is making the top for the engine cooling air plenum chamber. I've been putting off starting on this, as I hadn't figured out how I was going to seal the front of the plenum chamber to the cowling. You need a good seal there, or a bunch of the high pressure air that comes in the inlets won't actually be used to cool the engine. You incur a drag penalty for each bit of air that comes in the inlets, so if you want the maximum performance, you need to ensure that all that air is actually used to cool the engine. I think I've finally come up with a concept to seal the front of the plenum, and I've started doing a bit of work to confirm the concept will work. I'll start work on the plenum once I have confirmed the sealing concept will work.