Kevin is “headin’ down the back stretch”. (Cutting the fabric being the “first turn”.) The 12 bags of gores continue to grow ever larger. At this point he’s got all of the gores (except one — see explanation below) completed from panels 2 thru 12. Adding panels 1 and 13 requires the arrival of the last of the fabric.<\/p>\n
The navy blue fabric shortage issue has been solved with the quick action of two other balloon builders, specifically Bill Whelan and Greg Winker, who have appropriate stuff in their private stockpiles. Bill is sending some spiffy silver fabric to finish the tops of the gores. Greg is sending a bit more green for use in the vent. (Kevin says “Thanks guys!”)<\/p>\n
Today’s “glitch of the day” was the discovery that we somehow managed, in spite of carefully counting as we went along, to cut one too few of panel #11. So Kevin is going to have to get his hands on some more navy blue fabric after all. (Sigh.) It is indeed always something. As a result, one gore will remain incomplete for a while. This is more of an irritant than a practical matter. The incomplete gore can be left as the last one joined to the others.<\/p>\n
After some methodical sleuthing, Kevin managed to identify the math error that led to under-ordering the navy blue fabric in the first place. It seems that his spreadsheet for figuring the amount of fabric based its calculations upon the longer of the two horizontal edges of each panels. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the way the arithmetic in the spreadsheet was implemented, the upper edge was always taken as the longer one.<\/p>\n
This worked fine for the green and sky blue fabric which were located on the lower part of the balloon where the diameter increases as the higher you go. But, as must be the case, the process reverses on the top (navy blue) portion of the balloon — with the lower edge being longer than the upper edge.<\/p>\n
So, the fabric math mystery is solved. Although I don’t know if this makes Kevin feel all that much better.<\/p>\n
What does make Kevin feel good is knowing that he is at least fairly close to having finished sewing the individual panels together.<\/p>\n
We wait with bated breath for the arrival of the UPS truck on Tuesday. If it brings enough stuff (fabric and load tapes) then Kevin can proceed unimpeded. Otherwise, he may be forced to take a day or two off while he waits for the last of the materials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kevin is “headin’ down the back stretch”. (Cutting the fabric being the “first turn”.) The 12 bags of gores continue to grow ever larger. At this point he’s got all of the gores (except one — see explanation below) completed from panels 2 thru 12. Adding panels 1 and 13 requires the arrival of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.xlta.org\/buildlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}