Simple Repairs

In this pastime of ours occasional mishaps occur, and many individuals go home with damaged aircraft. In many cases this means the aircraft will not fly again… it will lie in loft, garage or cupboard never to see the light of day again.

Many think the repair of such damage is beyond them. However, in many cases things can be fixed reasonably well and possibly even better, particularly if the model is an ARTF. Having fixed a few ARTF's the amount of things uncovered in these mass produced models can be frightening. For example my son had a mid air collision with his Soprano. The result was that an 8" chunk (20cm for those under 40 years old) had been taken out of the starboard wing all the way back to the spar. Fortunately he landed it. On investigation the ribs were only glued to the D section in about ¼ of the cases. Many of the ribs were not glued to the trailing edge and the only thing stopping them moving was the adhesive of the film. Prior to this accident the plane had about 45 flights without mishap.

To sort this was straight forward, mostly thin cyanao and some templates of the missing ribs of the D section cut from 1/8th (3mm) balsa and a new skin put on. Total time: about 5-6 hours at a cost of £1.50 for a sheet of 1/8th balsa. I did have odd bits of film so no cost there, but if I had bought new it would have added another £4.00.