Charlie decorated for Halloween

We  decided to dress Charlie up a bit for Halloween.  Enticed by a promise of hot coffee and donuts, four guys showed up,  We worked a coupla hours and made the old machine look a bit festive for the season.

Here is John Pugh showing off what he can do with a few of those big bags left over from our V. V. A. road-side trash pick up day. ( The bags will be recycled and used for their intended purpose later.)

They are really hard to see, but there is a blow-up, lighted witch in the copilot's seat above the Jack O'lantern, and a lighted up set of green ghoul hands and skull in the window.  This is the handiwork of Commandant Everett Wood of our local Marine Corps League detachment #1110. Also a  very rare, huge helicopter  spider (spiderific sikorskiius) lurks to the right of the Jack O'lantern. Note the remains of the spider's last meal at the tire!

Here is  "I need a bigger hammer" Barry Gage working on trying to free up one of the rotor blade hubs so we can hang the blades on the beast. He says we may have to do the same thing we did with the tail rotor--take it all apart and take it to his shop so we can use a hydraulic press to get the taper pins out.  They are really stuck!  We used a whole can of  spray Aero-Kroil loosener on them with no luck.The spray was donated by our local helicopter company, Timberline.  They operate H-43 Kamax helicopters for logging and other external load work. They run a very clean operation.

The big news is that Barry was able to get the rotor head turning.  All he did was disconnect the short shaft between the transmission and the rotor brake.  It seems the rotor brake was frozen after decades of sitting in the desert.  The tranny actually turns quite smoothly. It looks good for getting the main blades on soon.

The witch was too hard to see and has since been replaced with a flashing back-lighted Frankenstein.

Richard Oliver continues to be very supportive of having Charlie live in the side yard of his custom auto body business,  Quality Collision repair.  Thank You again Richard!
Also, Richard's wife Jonnie Bradly publishes the WIZE GUIDE, a very thorough directory of senior services availabe locally.  She did a short article about Charlie being in our local 4th of July parade.