Having operated G-EWIZ for a season, the decision to take her out of the air for five or six months was quite a scary one: the decision was finalised in the autumn of 1996, but were we biting off more than we could chew?

The first, most obvious requirement was to find somewhere large enough in which to work: a large shed or factory unit, close by, would be ideal. After a fairly extensive period of head scratching, Dave Howdle (then co-owner) suggested that we use the old outhouses close to his textile works in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. We decided on two smallish rooms at one end of the building; one for storage and one to carry out the work. Both rooms required a thorough clean out, and an old aeromodelling friend of Dave's, nicknamed Mac, kindly built a large polythene tent inside the larger of the two rooms in order to create a relatively clean and controlled environment. The integrity of this structure would prove to be crucial during the latter stages of the restoration when we were spraying the top coat.
The work commenced in January 1997, under the supervision of Rob Millinship of Aerographic. I cut my teeth on recovering the newly stove enamelled tailplanes, elevators and rudder; learning the basic covering techniques and rib stitching. For those of you contemplating a similar project, this sort of job, along with paint stripping cowls and side panels, can be carried out on a small scale in the comfort of your own garage, or for the more fortunate amongst you, the warmth of your kitchen!

Just to make life more exciting, Elaine and I were moving house at this stage, and arrived at our new home on a Thursday morning: the bottom wings arrived by trailer on Friday evening! I spent the weekend outside, stripping fabric and glue off the structure and on Monday morning, Rob and I were busy recovering the wings in the kitchen and dining room. Oddly enough the original owner of the house just happened to pop by at lunchtime; and there was much hilarity when Rob metioned that I had only bought the house to use as a workshop!
The wings were rib stitched and trailered up the M1 to Rotherham where they joined the remainder of the aeroplane, now reduced to a pile of bits. Rib stitching, by the way, is a nice clean job, and it's very satisfying when you get the tops of the loops nicely lined up: it's a bit tough on your back though and it does make you look at other peoples efforts with a critical eye!

We stripped the top wing and cleaned the aluminium leading edges ready for fabric; unfortunately, we did not think to check the tension in the drag/anti-drag wires. This oversight was not unreasonable, given our knowledge of the airframe at the time. The wires looked to be correctly tensioned, but unfortunatley were not (more of this later). Having replaced the trailing edge with a beefier section, the fabric went on easily and was really a repeat performance of the bottom set of wings. Starting with the underside, the fabric was taken from around the top of the D box underneath the ribs and up and around onto the top of the trailing edge. The upper surface, overlapping similarly, by running from the bottom of the D box around the leading edge, over the ribs, and back to the underside of the trailing edge. This system tends to hide or at least disguise any signs of the overlap; in fact, by the time the wing was taped up, there were no telltale edges to speak of.

Much of the early work on the fuselage involved stripping, cleaning and beautifying edges of cowls, side panels, fittings and fairings ready for primer. With three people on the go, the job was not quite so tedious as it might have been. It's at this stage, just prior to primer, when you're laying out all the bits, that you realise just how much space is required even for a small aeroplane like a Pitts when it's in kit form.

In an ideal world, this sort of work would be carried out in a large workshop just outside your back door, so that you could pop outside for half an hour, and perhaps stick a coat of dope on, or drill a few holes. My sixty mile round trip up and down the M1 was getting slightly tedious, so the best way to speed things up was to go up to Rotherham before of after work, according to my shift pattern; and sometimes carry out my stand by duties for the company from there. Turning up in the crew room at East Midlands Airport, smelling of cellulose thinners like some sort of substance addict, became a regular occurence; and dried on superseam gives you something to pick at when you're stuck in traffic.

Apart from simply covering the aeroplane, we decided to add some extra aluminium side panels as far back as the rear of the cockpit. Strips of 4130 were welded to the structure, to which we then riveted the captive nuts; this made a great improvement to the aeroplane's appearance, and it is know pretty much standard practise at the factory.

February and March were spent getting the basics right, and by April/May, we were spending some time doping the flying services and spraying side panels. Apart from Mac's jokes, humidity and contamination were the two biggest problems for us. Being so close to the pennines, the air was sometimes too damp for spraying. Contamination, possibly from David's factory, lead us to adopt almost obsessive levels of cleanliness. We did make progress, but found ourselves, on the odd occasion, rejecting 25% to 30% of the panels and fittings, and these would simply be flatted back ready for respraying.

The paint scheme was almost factory standard, except for the addition of the chequer board and the choice of a very bright automotive red. Lettering and chequer board stencils were cut by computer from sticky plastic and made the job of masking up that little bit easier and more impressive.

Basic reassembly of the fuselage was carried out in Rotherham and the whole lot was then transported to Netherthorpe airfield for final rigging and re-weighing prior to flight in July.

The drag/anti-drag wire saga came to a head two years later after we experienced repeated damage to the trailing edge of the top wing. Alarm bells finally rang and we realised that some fabric repair work had been carried out prior to our involvement with the aeroplane. We conjectured that the top wing had been flexing ever so slightly back and forth as the aerodynamic loads varied with speed; this put the trailing edge under compression, causing it to fail: it had probably been like that since the aeroplane had been built in 1982. In July 1999 the top wing was removed and trailered to the house next door to us: they just happened to have a garage long enough to take the top wing of a Pitts! The fabric was stripped, wires correctly tensioned, and wooden leading and trailing edges added to improve the bracing still further: an expensive oversight!

Overall, the aeroplane is in much better condition now that it has been for a while; my knowledge of the structure and its limitations has improved, and this is no bad thing when you're flying some maneouvers! I now see myself not so much the owner of an aeroplane, but rather as one of many who will look after it (and thats just what you tell the nice lady at the bank!).