Hi there,
to be honest I'm a beginner too. I'm just lucky to have a friend that is expert in this since many years
and who shows me how to go about it. So here we go on with the . . .
Rebuild of Tail & Tail wheel
The damages the tail suffered were only partly due to my pilot error. Pulling off the plastic sheets we
discovered, that the tail of this PIPER had not been built well in China. So we decided not just to
repair the damage but to reinforce the wooden structures according to our standards.
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 