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…

So much for “just giving the fuselage a light sand…..” St. Peter declared that all the grey paint had to be removed as well. I tried his patented acetone/gladwrap method but it proved not suitable for the task. So I got a load of MEK to see if this would give more chemical grunt, but…

Another productive paint stripping day. There are a few spots to be detailed, but otherwise the old topcoat is GONE! Next item on the list is to ask St. Peter to come and sanctify the work so far, help us prepare a re-coating plan for the fuselage and give us some advice about how to…

After the production line paint stripping of yesterday, today was more of a clean up the leftovers day. I also did a bit of sanding with 120 grit, it cleans things up very nicely. Did I mention that KYU was operated from a sheep paddock, which had left a thick cake of sheep shit as…