It's a disaster zone!

Once painting is done I can pull everything out and sweep it up; until then the dirt and dust stay on the floor.

That's unnatural.



Crankshaft is bent, or at least out of true to where I'm going to replace it.

So I have to order a new one and then do the whole tear down, replace, and rebuild thing.

What's another three hundred bucks, right?

Dart, as a fellow taildragger and biplane pilot (and maybe some day an aviator, not just a mere pilot..), I love your dedication and skill. Your plane looks great!

Four of our five Tiger Moths do not have brakes. We usually land on the grass next to the runway, as that allows the tail skid to dig in and offer some control.
Do you usually wheel your plane in, or do you three-point her? Is she nervous around the yaw axis while on the ground?

He is alluding to the girls that I have clean the hangar in exchange for sight-seeing flights.

He can't keep things quiet.

Short wheel base = squirrelly on three pointers, so it's wheel landings, and letting the tail drop on her own and then pasting it there. Kind of funny that I almost exclusively three pointed the Champ.

But it's your typical "lazy" wheel landing, in that it's tail low with just a touch of power, so it could turn into a three pointer if she wanted it, and since the Nieuport is one big exercise in drag, once the mains are down the stick doesn't need to go full forward. She'll settle and track straight for about 200 feet and the tail's down at just a little forward of neutral.

I'm still landing her a little hot, but it's a long runway and airspeed is my friend.

Hell, one could keep the stick there or just a bit behind neutral and be just fine all the way to the hangar.*

Indeed, landing her was easy to figure out - I was takeoffs that I had to seriously work through. It took a few flights to figure out that it's stick back about a four inches from neutral and let her takeoff from a three point configuration. My Flight #2 video is what happens if the tail comes up too soon. Loads of elevator, so it'll come up before the rudder has authority.

* My Nieuport in many ways is just a fat ultralight, so it's super VFR low winds kind of plane. I had one eight knot wind crosswind landing - no video, naturally - that I actually nailed, but no damned fun at all. I considered taking the WWII strip that is officially a taxiway/access road if I had to bail out of it, as it's 90 degrees to the official one.

Using the grass at my field is a no go unless one has a bush plane. Plowed fields have fewer ruts and holes. Plus the mowing is so inconsistent that it's a crap shoot. The airfield cuts the grass between the runways and on the outsides o the VASI lights, and the Speedway cuts it past that. In my wreck, if they had cut the grass past that tiny strip there wouldn't have been a wreck...but the grass was over knee high instead.