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Sun-N-Fun 2008
I was only able to get enough time off for one day of sun and fun, so I arrived very early and ready to get started. I left my Mom's house (north of tampa) before 5:00 and made it to the Lakeland airport just as the sun was coming up. This turned out to be a good thing, because as you can see in the first picture below, it was really muddy in the parking area. I later heard that some people waited a few hours to get a parking spot.
I paid for my day admission and started checking out the exhibitors. Since it was before the official opening, most of them weren't there and it was very peaceful. I had previously looked at the schedule and figured out which seminars I wanted to see, so I was on a mission to find the locations of each of them.
My first stop was at the Lincoln pavilion. My first mission was the welding seminar, and I was there a few minutes early to get a good seat. I learned about the basics of the TIG welding process and got to try it briefly on steel and aluminum. The Lincoln guys were very good at keeping the scope of the class in line with the short amount of time available. Next I tried some oxy-acetylene welding and had a great instructor. He was the first one to tell me about spending a long time in the line to get into the parking lot. The trouble was that unusually heavy rains had rendered the parking areas almost unusable.
After the welding stuff I made a quick pass through some of the other workshops. I learned about sheet metal, then I stopped by the wood workshop. I tried out some cable swagging and then it was just about time for the fabric seminar.
After the fabric seminar, I took a walk around the outdoor exhibits and watched the show. For fun I was using Tabitha's 300mm lens with a 2x teleconverter. That made for a monster zoom, but also made it really hard to find the airplanes in the viewfinder!
Here was a nifty motorcycle that looked like a lot of fun.
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