I've been trying to reactivate my competition Platt Focke Wulf 190 D-9 from the 1980's. I retired it in the 90's because it was built with ambriod and epoxy and things were getting a bit loose. In the early 00's I noticed the nitrate dope had tightened up so much that it was cracking at all the balsa sheeting seams. It was sad at first because it was a horrible end to probably my BEST FLYING plane ever (I've built 120 planes in my modeling carrier). Then it struck me! If the covering is cracked, the crack may extend down to those questionable bulkheads that were unreachable before. With a 20mil drill I was able to break through to the open area in front of the bulkheads, insert one of the CA tubes and glue everything back together. The original Rossi .65 RE was long gone so I tried a Saito 1.5 but it was just to rough for the all balsa front end of this plane. Then I had a Super Tiger G-90 free up so in it went. All this took place over a three year period, finally culminating in a maiden flight (on a plane with 200+ flights on it) this august. The first flight had one gear that did not come up all the way, but other than my nerves was flawless. Upon landing the retracts worked flawlessly (of coarse), so I opened the wheel collars a bit and reflew. The same wheel hung up then I knew the problem was not in getting air to the cylinder but in letting it out. In some point in the landing I picked up a glitch in turns 2 and three the far ones so I landed prematurely. Once on the ground safely I looked the plane over and noticed the 70's vintage spinner was missing a screw, and was fatigued and cracking. I stop cracked it, replaced the screw and noticed that area had deformed. One more flight to see if these actions had solved the problem and it did not.

So this has been in front on the CMP Zero on the work bench for a while now, I put a new Sky Shark spinner on it and switched to a DX7 RX. All is done and ready for a test flight which hopefully will be tomorrow.

During this time I mounted the engine box on the CMP Zero and the engine only to find out that my pylons were to short and pushed the muffler into the scope on the bottom of the fuse. I've decided the most prudent method for fixing this is to add another washer to the pylons. So I need to remove the engine ad a washer to each pylon re R6000 everything and screw it back down. I ruled out dremeling away the fiberglass causing the problem because that could cause stress cracking once I start running the engine.