Actually, I don't follow you- having something flexible (and therefore uncompetitive and inconsistent) that manages to stay together forever isn't advancing the cause. The cause being maximizing the likelihood of winning contests. Tossing something together at Warp 9 and hoping it works with a few days of trimming and practice is something that maybe a very experience modeler could do with some chance of success, but the chance of doing it as a relative novice with maybe 3-4 airplanes under his belt, and only one complex model, is darn near zero.
The idea that you would take an airplane that is proven competitive, and hang it on the wall ~5 weeks before a critical contest is not good advice. I agree that it needs to be safe, but merely reinforcing the fuselage is sufficient to ensure that. If the fuse stays together, the chances of the wing coming out completely is essentially zero so it will be safe enough. The real goal is to make sure it both stays together AND is solid enough to be competitive at the TT. That will likely take more effort to achieve that, given the fact that the wing is double-covered but *only to the fuse sides*, which is a pretty serious, "almost-certain-to-be-fatal-eventually" problem.
So I think it's going to be fixable and the airplane will be safe and competitive pretty soon.
Note that Robert is in the minority here -- most folks are trying to suggest avenues to pursue to get the thing fixed.
I don't have your experience with CLPA specifically, but I've been a sport flyer for a long, long time, and I learned how to fly RC on planes that I designed and built from scratch, and in the process occasionally rebuilt planes that came home in a grocery bag. I think that Robert's suggestion comes from the impulse we all have after a crash, which is to stomp the plane into the ground and start over.
One should always resist that impulse -- instead, one should look at the plane with an eye to assessing what's good and what's bad, and decide what's the best way to get there from where we are
now, unencumbered by what recent events may have made you wish to do, or what looks impressive in magazine reports after the fact.
p.s - some of the advice in this thread is borderline insane - you can repair it in place just as well as you can by taking the fuselage off the airplane!!!!!
I hope that Matt is taking this (rather large!) thread with an equally large grain of salt. We only have pictures and the occasional news bulletin -- Matt's the man on the ground here, he knows what his skill set is, and he's got the best chance of actually knowing what's going on with the airplane. I know what I would
think I would do if I had a plane with those stated symptoms, but repair plans, like battle plans, often get changed at the first contact with the enemy.
I'm not sure why you're making your crack about repairing it in place vs. reducing the airplane back to an ARC and starting over. That's almost as crazy as hanging it on the wall and starting from bare balsa. If the actual problem doesn't require it, it's
more crazy. Finishing a plane is a huge part of the total work, and any repair approach should -- quite rightly -- be assessed with an eye toward the damage it's going to do to the finish. I suppose that one could make the claim that because you don't get appearance points in FAI that you could fudge this -- I wouldn't, unless it was making the difference between going and not going.
I know that I was recommending an approach that might avoid any damage to the external finish of the plane, but that was prefaced with an 'if', and that 'if' was if the damage was what I thought it was. And I didn't even take the approach that certain other contributers to this forum do, and tell him what to do while assuming that I was the only human being in the whole entire history of the race that has ever possessed a sense of judgment. Instead, I figured that even at his age he's accomplished enough that I can just
suggest an approach, and trust him to decide on the details. Clearly, if the repair is going to fix damage that doesn't matter then it is pointless.
So, Paul Walker suggested a problem, and an appropriate fix that could be carried out without disturbing the external finish -- are you suggesting that it's better that Matt get out the knife and saw and 'remove the fuselage' if that turns out to be the problem? Instead of sanding a cruddy few square inches of paint off of a section of the plane that'll never be seen, and putting in some cruddy unfinished doublers that will again never be seen, and maybe getting out an acid brush and slathering some cruddy plain old epoxy glue on it so it doesn't absorb fuel? This one-afternoon task is
worse than ripping the whole plane apart and starting over?
Topic: Why is my wing cracking? (Read 11636 times)