Well,
Here's the story: Took kinda a long time but, at the 2004 Nats I crashed my plane in the hourglass while nearly having everyone chasing it after a forced landing nearly get their legs chopped off. Anyway, just 4 days before leaving for the Nats/wedding of my son I accidentally stepped on the outboard upper planking of my Intrepid X/L.
I had to fix it fast so I pull the wood up as best possible and CA's it in place. There was still a considerable dent in the LE so I then filled that in with green spackling paste. I sanded that carefully so it was even and primed and painted it with the good old Miami Blue paint. You could hardly tell there was any repair to the planking.
First round of qualifying was thrown out due to high winds. The next round of qualifying was on circle four and that caused me some confusion as to what exactly caused my plane to fall from the top of the hourglass, but now, I have it figured out. After refinishing the top of the outboard planking I didn't have much time to figure out how much tip weight in the weight box to remove,
I removed some, but now know it was not nearly enough. I had excess weight in my outboard tip. Not enough to cause much in the way of hinging but at the top of that hourglass I hit the controls very hard to get a reasonable turn and corner. Well, that's what I shouldn't have done, the extra weight in the outboard tip forced the outboard wing tip forward making the airplane loose ten feet of altitude instantly and begin on an uncontrolled path toward the circle 4 tarmack. I ran backwards as fast as my old legs would take me and managed to hit the end of the lines while the airplane was nose down at a point on the tarmack about 4 foot altitude.
The airplane turned hard slowed to nearly a stop and smacked the ground with the prop and landing gear. It cut about the outboard 1/3 of all 3 prop blades off but continued flying very slowly, with the engine running very speedily. To keep from frying the engine
I landed and the plane started taxiing around the tarmack at that point with PW chasing it with a rag to stop the engine. the airplane began circling around and finally flipped over stopping the engine. Moral of the story, don't step on your wing and have to fix it before a contest. However, if you do, make sure that you have check out the weight gain and rebalanced the aircraft adequately.
Jim Pollock
Topic: Figured it out finally! (Read 938 times)