On Mar 10, 11:18*am, JS wrote:
* There is no other 1-26 as hot rodded as that which graced the
western skies 15+ years ago.
Huge pieces of mylar material were used for the aileron gap seal.
The wingtip wheels were faired with something that looked like paper
mache applied by a toddler.
The tow vehicle had similar mylar treatment to the wheel wells.
* There were more mods, but my eyes were tearing so much I probably
couldn't see them. Several people wet themselves, and one nearly
required a hospital visit after the hysteria.

Har! About 8 years before that, I showed up at my club one Sunday
morning to pull out the 1-34 and discovered someone had made
"fairings" for the wing tip wheels out of clear package sealing tape.
They'd also taped over a few of the deeper dents on the old bird and I
can't remember what else. I spent an extra 40 minutes removing all
this tape and cleaning up the adhesive and flew the ship. Sometime
later this red haired fellow whose name you might recognize shows up
(he was not an early riser) and starts hollering about "who took my
fairings off", etc. etc. He thought he was going to fly a 300K
triangle for a standard class record in that thing, having shown up at
about 2pm. Yes, it was amusing. In fact, I don't ever remember him
flying cross country prior to this little episode. I don't think he's
in soaring any longer... if he is, he's gone quiet and this strikes me
as improbable. I do wonder though, if it was the same guy....

In retrospect, what I wish we'd done is called a local A&P (not a
soaring club regular) to show up and conduct a "ramp check" on this
guy, asking for form 337s and all the rest, but I'm not certain we
could have lasted three minutes without laughing.

-T8