Well, I haven’t been able to fly for a while, and I don’t want to start on any new projects, so I’m down to finishing up previously started projects and repairing broken stuff. Here is my Flitestreak that I crashed back in June (Hey! I’m still just a beginner…):
The fuselage could have been patched up, but I decided to go with a longer nose/tail. I’d read about putting a Flitestreak wing in a Skyray fuselage. Since I’d just finished building three Skyray 35s, I figured I’d do that.
First, I spread everything out to see what I had. The wing wasn’t in too bad shape. The nose was obviously toast. I’d heard of Monokote exploding on a crash, but this was my first experience with it.
Bottom:
I tore off the covering to see what I had with the wing. Both leading edges had dents and divots in them. The center section was okay from the spar back, but wrecked spar forward. Almost all ribs were either cracked or broken forward of the spars.
The first thing I did was either glue the cracked ribs, or make up new half ribs to repair the broken ribs. Then I made new full ribs for the three center ribs. I re-glued the bellcrank plate securely to the center section. I cut a piece of square stock to replace the leading edge piece, reinforced it, and sanded it to shape. Then I made up new center section sheeting. Next I filled in all the leading edge divots.
Once I had the wing repaired, I cut away the rear fuselage. I had left the wing in the fuselage so I could use the rear fuse as a holding fixture while I glued the repair pieces back in. It kept the wing from flexing as I played with it. Sorry, no pics of this as I was just wanting to get this over with and done. An interesting thing, I knew the nose was hollow with formers, but I didn’t know the entire fuselage was hollow. Makes for a light fuselage, but the wood that was used was garbage wood. But, I’ll have to remember this method in the future. I cut the new fuselage from ½” balsa before I finished the wing repair and cut away of the old fuse. I now wish I had cut away the old fuse first. I’d have liked to have built the rear of the replacement fuselage the same way using quality wood for a lighter plane. I’d have used a solid front piece, of course.
Next I covered the wing using the last of some 20 year old red Monokote I had on a roll. Just enough covering to do the whole wing with some scraps left over to cover rough spots on the stabilizer. I covered the fuselage and fin with white Econokote I had in the covering box. I didn’t care about using different types of covering. I’m just trying to use up all the old stuff I have on hand. I glued the wing and empennage into the fuse (yes, I know the tail looks crooked, either to the left or right depending on which pic you're looking at. It's just the cheap camera). Then I made up new and improved leadouts, de-soldered the original pushrod and made up a new aft piece to fit the longer fuselage. The new pushrod ended up 1 ¾” longer than the original. I thought about making up a carbon fiber tube pushrod, but this is just something I’m gonna crash again soon, so I just wanted to fix it fast and cheap using materials on hand.
To finish, I bolted on a set of landing gear I got at a swap meet last year for $1.50, installed a Sullivan 4 ounce clunk tank, and then an O.S. .25 LA I got last week through the Classifieds here that I converted to LA-S configuration using the appropriate stock O.S. venturi and needle assembly I got from Tower.
Voila!
Mark
Topic: My FlightRay/SkyStreak/Whatever (Read 931 times)