When we looked at the push-pull wire used for moving the trim tab yesterday, I didn’t like the geometry which appeared to cause quite a lot of bending. With my seaplane I had a failure of a similar push-pull trim tab wire after 250 hours, which caused the plane to transition instantly from nice hands-off…

Today we sanded the 1st undercoat on the fuselage and horizontal stabiliser and applied the 2nd undercoat. I think it looks pretty good, but I think Laurie is more self-critical in that department. So the options from here are: a) Apply the top coat(s) by roller as for the undercoats, using a finer type of…

Laurie got back from Qland and we launched straight into applying the Norseal epoxy filler, preceeded by a de-dusting of the surfaces with moistened Wettex. We rolled on this very low viscosity mix in a couple of hours onto the fuselage, and another hour brushing onto the tail feathers. We only used half of the…

Repairs to inside cockpit walls: So I thought that was the lot as far as cockpit wall cracks was concerned. But then I decided to take out the seat pans to check out the floor area, and found another set of cracks! By now I’ve got that system down pat and it didn’t take long…

Tackled the repair of the cockpit wall cracks today. After a bit of head scratching I decided to cut out the cracked section and made a backing strip out of 2 mm plywood, the back edges of which were feathered to avoid stress risers. The size of the backing strip was determined after making a…

Pete came over to inspect our progress, with 3m x 1.9m white Oratex fabric under his arm. He had told me that he had this left over from a previous job, and that he would donate it for our ailerons. Unfortunately there is not enough to do the 4 ailerons, each measuring 2.4m x 0.36m,…

Liz and I had a week’s holiday down on the Murray in Victoria. On return I had a message from Pete advising he was back from Qland and that he was available to do an inspection prior to us applying the paint coats. Before I went away I started fixing up a couple of minor…

Fixing a broken hinge on the fin bottom inspection hatch. The new hinge is on the right. It’s made from 0.5 mm 6061 aluminium sheet, same as the original from which one of the hoops had broken off. The new hinge was attached to the lid with pop rivets , and the assembly fixed to…

We had our regular Monday and Friday workathons the last few weeks, mainly fixing up plywood bits and bobs. A real suprise awaited us after removing the fabric from the trim tab: a number of gussets and corner reinforcements had come adrift. Thanks to Pete we had some suitable plywood to hand to make replacement…

Pete advised that their Bocian VH-WOH had its first flight after refurbishment last weekend – congratulations! Looks great guys! To make sure ours won’t be too far behind being flyable again, we bit the bullet today and ripped the fabric off the rudder. The paint had become brittle and created fisheye cracks wherever it was…