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The Shop
Moving to Maxwell was my first experience living in on-base quarters.
We had 3200sq-ft under roof in Florida and four garage bays. The house
didn't sell when we moved and the schools around Montgomery are not glowing
examples, so we took base housing. I hate it. Housing for Company
Grade Officers at Maxwell is tiny - we have about 1700sq-ft, but it's so cut
up most of it is wasted.
 Commonly
called row-houses, they are basically concrete block barns about as deep as a
double-wide trailer and 200 feet long. Some are arranged for three
families, others for four. We have a tiny utility/storage room that
also contains the gas and water stack for the rest of the building and
precious little room to store anything bigger than a rake. No garage,
no unoccupied bedrooms, no toy/playroom. Sheds and storage buildings
are specifically forbidden. The few cabinets are falling apart and
there are at least four layers of Peel-and-Stick tile in the kitchen.
No insulation in the ceilings. No closets and no storage. HVAC
was an afterthought. Some folks say that these buildings were used as
stables in the past - I believe it. Roaches, rats and feral cats we
have a-plenty.
 But I do
have a covered porch. It's only about 7-1/2 feet deep, but it's nearly 70 feet long
with the front door in the middle. Each half of the porch is
faced with a knee-wall, iron railing and pillars that make four openings that
measure a little over eight feet wide and five feet high.
 I used some galvanized fencing brackets to mount three 2x4s in three of the
four openings on one end of the porch. Then screwed some lattice to the
outside of the frame. Sheets of 1/2" foam insulation screwed to the
inside keep the rain, wind and most of the bugs out. I made a light
frame out of 2x4s and used two hollow-core doors left over from other
projects to close the work space. Three windows and a fan provide a
little heat in cold weather.
For Empennage construction, I used saw-horses and
another door for a work surface, and mounted my vise on an old metal-frame
table. I didn't bother to make any jigs or cradles to hold the pieces
until I started working on the fiberglass tips. I should have made them
before I started.
 While I waited for the wing kit to show up, I re-arranged my workspace and cobbled a wing jig together. Jig is probably
too strong a word. With the pre-punched kits, a jig is not really necessary. What you really need is a place to
hang the spars so you can build the wing around them. So I took eight 2x4s and screwed pairs together for the posts.
A little Liquid Nail on the floor and two screws at the top hold them in
place. 1x1x1/8" angle lagged to the posts at about shoulder height support the spars. The height is not important. It needs to be
more than about 40 inches off the ground to clear the rear spar and top skin, and the spar needs to be at a comfortable height
for drilling and riveting. Build your jig to fit you - the wing doesn't care.
 I hacked a workbench together by mounting shelf brackets to the wall and topping them with three 2x6x12 boards to form a long,
narrow workbench. Air lines plumbed underneath give me plenty of places to plug in the air drill, squeezer or rivet gun.
The down-braces make a handy rack to store spars, tubes and other long,
narrow parts.
It's a little hard to see, but look again at the
photo of the doors above. Study the sheet of plywood behind the file
cabinet. I took a chunk of plywood from the wing skin crate and screwed
a 2x2 to one end. Two hinges out of the junk box attach the 2x2 to the
door that I rarely open near the bottom. Two screw-eyes and a piece of
string hold the un-hinged end of the plywood against the door. It makes
a great place to store wing skins and keep them from getting bent, dropped,
scratched or otherwise abused.
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