I tried several times over the past week and a half to write a post but have had trouble finding the time. Last Friday (April 4th) I had a thesis draft due. This involved staying up all night on Thursday to get as much done as I could. Although my final progress wasn’t as far as I had a hoped, it was still a decent draft and illustrated most of my main conclusions.
That Friday night was S-Dance, which was pretty awesome. A mere $10 for a gigantrix buffet with great food followed by several hours of dancing. The DJ was running pretty much entirely off of requests, which was nice because we got to hear such awesomeness as What Is Love?, Rasputin, and Rapper’s Delight (yes, the full 15 minute version!).
I did not get home from that until about 1:00 in the morning, so by that time I had been awake for nearly 50 hours. Needless to say, I crashed and slept for a good portion of Saturday morning. I moped around my room for most of the day, and then headed up to Kim and Kari’s place to watch Battlestar Galactica, which I had *ahem* recorded the previous night. The original plan was to have an after party on the Friday night, but we were all dead, so..
That’s when everything pretty much fell apart. I became violently sick, and I have been fighting this since. I am fairly certain it started as a simple viral infection that I was unable to fight off due to having been awake for so long. Being exhausted and already sick, this allowed a bacterial infection to grow in my lungs, which is always a fun time. I spent most of the week cycling through not being able to breath, sweating profusely from fever, fighting off nose bleeds while trying to clear my sinuses, and trying not to hack up too many lungs. I figured I might need them someday.
This really didn’t help matters with our airplane, as I was not able to stay and work late, and even the time I was there I could barely focus on the tasks at hand. Despite this however, and with the hard work of Ling, Dmitri, and Xun, we got the plane finished, and boy is she beautiful!
On her first flight in the morning, the pilot put her down quick because of some serious instability in pitch. She landed pretty hard, necessitating some serious repair work. We replaced the entire fuselage with a carbon-Nomex-carbon rod, affixing it to the wing body and to the canard using strips of carbon fibre and epoxy.
In order to rid ourselves of the instability problems, we needed to move our CG forward, increasing the lift generation of the canard. We extended the carbon rod forward of the canard and mounted the LiPo battery out front. This helped somewhat but was still insufficient. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures handy, but our final solution to move the CG forward was to attach a set of metal clamps to the fuselage.
These adjustments paid off quite nicely. In the afternoon, she flew beautifully and completed all the required maneuvers and circuits! All in all a fun day, however it’s not over yet.. we have yet to write our final report, which is due Monday.
Once we got back from the fly-off on Thursday, I once again had to stay up all night to work on my thesis. I had meant to get a lot more done during the week, however with my sickness I was never able to. If I was at home, I was in bed trying not to die. As a result, I am actually quite ashamed with what I have submitted. It is a poorly written and topically incomplete paper, borne of the necessity to meet a deadline. During exams I hope to do some more work on it and re-write it as my supervisor, Dr. Zingg, deserves to have a much better work in his archives. I know this won’t affect my grade on the thesis, however as I’ve said before, this is Engineering Science.. we don’t care about our marks, we care about looking stupid =(
So now it’s back to the grind. One more paper and three more exams, and I will have finished my undergraduate degree. Man, this is scary!
