Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Fixing a Totally Broken Wing

Wow! I sure am glad January is gone, for two reasons. Reason #1 is that I froze my fanny off. Reason #2 is that January’s blog calendar was an embarrassment. There was a two-week stretch where I didn’t write much of anything. If you don’t know it already, if you quit writing in your blog your regular readers quit dropping by. In that regard I don’t care all that much except for Karen. She is a great reader of my blog and I know if nobody else reads it Karen will.

Writing a blog requires discipline. The reason for my two week lapse was I had to crash on firewood cutting. When you are outside in subzero weather, it really drains you of vitality and when I would get in all I wanted to do was warm up and crash.

I bought this electric fly 3-D RC airplane from a friend of mine. It had a busted wing and like most of my models the price was right. One of the wings though was still intact and today I traced its outline and made a wing to replace the one that was destroyed. It turned out pretty good considering I didn’t have a plan. What I did was take the good wing and trace the tip rib and then the root rib. This gave me two templates. It was a complex wing where the size of the ribs tapered from large to small and the length did the same thing. It is a whole lot easier when all the ribs are the same size.

I found that by taking the tip or outermost rib and starting with that I could trace each of the interior ribs using the outside of a thick sharpie. Each time I cut one out it was a little bigger and a little longer. By the time I got to the fuselage my ribs had grown in size and length to where the last one was within a whisper of the root rib.

I could have cut the good wing up and used all the ribs for templates and that would have been the most exact but I was loath to cut up the half that was still good.

My friend said I would never get the base out of the fuselage without destroying it but actually it came out rather easily. That was because it had been covered before it was inserted into the slot and that was what the glue adhered to.

I also found that one of the rear servos was stripped out. He told me his dog stepped on it but I don’t believe that entirely. The dog might well have stepped on it but I suspect it was crashed before that. The dogs paw would not have stripped the servo gears while a hard impact will.

Once I get the wing back in and covered with Monocoat you won’t be able to see the difference.