Normally I do start my Piper at full throttle to evitate any kind of problems during the start.
That's very safe for the plane but it just doesn't look scale when you start like that. So after
years of starts at full throttle I wanted to start her slowly. Not being used to that procedure
and facing the end of the runway I pulled the elevator to hard and suddenly had her torquing
some feet over ground.

The motor is strong enough to torque and so for some seconds I gave full throttle but didn't
manage to stabilize her and so - in a moment when she was only a few feet over ground - I
pulled the throttle back totally.

My PIPER "landed" on the tip of her left wing and thenshe harshlytouched ground with the
tail wheel and then forwards on her propeller. So the left wing, the tail wheel and the
propeller were the parts that were damaged.
_________________________________________

Rebuilding the left wing

The first we did was to remove the plastic sheet. The first diagnose then was that the damages
looked much worse than what it would actually take to repare them and so we optimistically
scheduled an afternoon's workto fix it.



First we repaired the fins that were broken without any material lacking. Wepulled them back
into their original position and joined them with superglue. For that we used a hollow needle
with the superglue bottle; that way we can allocate the superglue very precisely and we can
inject superglue into the woods as well. Inner healing . . .

Then we looked after the wing ear which had suffered most through the crash.



From ply wood (2mm) we made a reinforcement . . .



. . . adjusted . . .



. . . and then glued it.



Then the badly injured binding piece (holm) got an additional reinforcement.



This building lot was then injected with superglue.



So now the wing was fully repaired and just lacked the plastic sheets from ORACOVER to be ironed on.
That's the advantage of wood structures - even seemingly big damages can be repaired quite easily.

Here's a close look on the repaired wing:





As soon as I find the time I'll post the pictures of the next steps we took . . .

Happy landings - Peter

On the picture below you can see that the holm is not glued to the tranversal end because it is some
millimeters short and if that were'nt enough . . .

. . . the upper two holms (see red circles on picture below) do en in the middle of nowhere. They
weren't broken through the crash, the really do end in the nirvana. The structure of the tail was held
together only through the part that carried the tail wheel. How that withstood so many landings is a
real miracle.

So now we teared away the plastic sheets to evaluate well the damages to the structure.

With a special knife we then straightened the balsa edges to make it easier to produce and glue
the parts to rebuild that part of the structure.

Rattling the struts we realized that there were yet more hidden damages under the cover. So we
detached the servo . . .

. . . and teared more plastic sheet away.

As much as possible we fixed the existing structure and handled the plastic sheets with care in
order to able to iron them on again after gluing the damaged parts together.

While the glue was drying we ironed the original foil on again.

Where we detected fissures we injected superglue with the hollow needle into the wood structure.
That's a very fast way to repair and it is amazingly robust afterwards.

Here another balsa edge is straightened . . .

So now the original structure is repaired wherever it was possible and all damaged parts that had
no remedy are removed. The next step will be the production of the missing parts and then the rebuilding.

To be continued . . .

Happy landings - Peter

Hi there,

so now it was time to rebuild the wooden structures :

On the following picture one can see the little board that held together the structure of the tail and the tail wheel (see
red frame). This little board was even weakened by a recess path for a metal strip (see some pictures farther down).

So in order to avoid the weakening of the replacement board we rasped down a path for that metal strip in the
plastic of the tail wheel suspension structure. This plastic piece doesn't suffer any by this while the wood structure
would be severely weakened by doing it there.

Then we took the measures of the fuselage . . .

. . . made notes . . .

. . . and introduced those measures into our turbo CAD software.

That was then cut out by our cnc-mill:

Here are the finished parts . . .

. . . loosely put together to test the adaptions.

But not every part fitted just like that and so we reworked the parts a bit.

We made this frame to reinforce the wooden structure in this part of the tail. The original structure didn't have such a frame.

We made yet another frame to reinforce the end of the fuselage. Additionally we extended the two holms that end in
the middle of this picture, shortly behind our first new frame.

In the end we relocated the frame on top, that carries the tail wheel.

That marked the end of the repairs on the wooden structure.

I'll be back with the pictures of the ironing of the plastic sheets and the finishing.

Happy landings - Peter

Hi there,

here is how the job was finished:

The next day the glue had dried off and that's how it looked:

Then we tested where to locate the tail wheel:

Then we sanded the wood structure . . .

. . . and started to iron on the plastic sheets - red on the bottom and white on the sides, just like it was before.

Then we marked the three holes for the screws of the tail wheel suspension.

Then we injected superglue into those holes in order to make them more stable so that they'll really hold those screws.

Then we covered both sides whith white ORACOVER foil.

Then the tail wheel was mounted:

The carbon trifoil airscrew had also been damaged:

Here she is with the new one:

So there she is again - ready to fly. The repair was worth the while and I'm happy to have my PIPER back again.

Crash ???? What crash????

So now she's back on her winter storage place under the roof - very scale . . .

Happy End !

I'll try not to return with a thread in this crash and rebuild section, but I do hope to see you all in
another thread elsewhere.

Happy landings - Peter