Hi Guys and Thanks for your thoughts! I spoke to a close friend about this situation and his imaginative suggestion is/was to cover over the existing film with SLC as sold by Phil Cartier. Most likely this would alleviate my propensity to poke holes in my own covering at the minimal expense of added weight! For now I simply try to be a bit more gentile with the old girl!
More gentile? You mean, like, serve it more pork products and make it work on a Saturday?
Seriously, I don't think there is any good solution to this problem aside from covering over it with something. The characteristic smell like a new roll is the plasticiser and adhesive/color outgassing, eventually, it has to be gone, and then UV eventually catches up with the plastic itself. Almost any plastic that is not filled with black pigment or covered with some opaque surface (like metalizing) will do about the same.
I have a few airplanes where the Monokote is effectively the consistency of chalk, just held on like a powder, and can easily be removed by low-tack masking tape with very clean edges. The last time the Skyray crashed, the crash was very mild, but the covering just shattered, and while I got it off OK, when I went to throw it away, I tried to wad it up, but it just turned into thousands of shards. It gets this way in as little at 15 years in California, where the UV is much stronger than the east.
BTW, it also gets this way on the roll, at least the few outer turns, from flourescent light in the hobby shop. You can feel the difference, the outer turns might be "crinkly" but the inner turns are still soft.
As an aside, dope doesn't do much better, but usually it is put over some other surface that is not as prone to the problem (like silkspan) and tends to block the UV from structural materials underneath.
Brett
Topic: Revitalization of old Mono-Coat on plane (Read 1067 times)