Don,
Sorry to hear about your frightful incident but glad it all came out well and you were able to save the plane. Oddly enough, I broke the top of the rudder slightly on mine today too. Having way too much fun lately with mine, we've had great weather this week, four straight days of fast and furious flying.
We had our club fun fly today and afterwards I got my Yak out and thrashed up the sky for 3 flights. On the last flight, I was coming in for landing and about 3 feet off the ground I was bleeding a little up elevator to flare in and reached for the "idle-down" switch. When I did, I lost the bleeding of the elevator at a very slow speed, the motor wound down fromt the idle down switch and the nose dropped. Like a deer in the headlights I stood there and watched it happen. [:'(]
Anyway, she lit hard on the mains at about a 40 degree angle and I heard a big crunch. She tipped up onto the spinner and flipped over on her back slamming the rudder onto the runway. Long story short, the crunching noise was my wheel pants. One is pretty munged up, the other has a crack in it. The rudder looks "crunched" at the top (wrinkled covering) but for the life of me I can't feel anything broken without opening the covering up. I'll check it out closely later. Surprisingly, as hard as I hit on the mains at a 40 degree angle, there appears to be no damage whatsoever to the gear or the surrounding area of the fuselage.
I guess I came out quite lucky considering such a dumb thumbs move and so little damage. If I have to cut up the rudder too much to get in and check it out, do you guys know what covering is used on the Yak? Hopefully I won't need to replace any, but too early to tell. Many this plane rocks... hopefully I'll have these minor repairs done soon and be back up in the air before you can say "anuerysm!"
Tom