I managed to crash my kit-built four star 60 (Sig Tig) and am finally getting around to trying to fix it. Basically I got caught by a crosswind gust on final approach when it was really too windy to be flying and had my wings flipped from horizontal to vertical. The plane went in knife-edge and though the wing is fine the torque snapped the tail right at one of the formers. I've cleaned off the monokote and removed the control rods from the guides, and though its a fairly clean break I'm a little lost as to how to proceed.
Before:
After:
Tail:
Holding the bits together:
So I can think of two ways to do this. One is to put a doubler on the outside across the break, like this:
Big downside to this is that the tail is going to look like it has an aneurysm, I'm not really into that. But it would be strong...
The other would be to get some tristock and try to fit it into the corners on the inside, to give the two halves something to fix to, something like this (just using some scrap here):
With that though, am I going to have enough gluing surface to end up with a strong glue joint? Its also going to be a huge pain because none of the angles in the tail are truly square, I'll have to do some precision sanding, and I know its not going to end up real precise.
Last idea I can't really mock up, but it would be to put doublers on the inside, but that would require carving holes in the former, and I'm worried that would weaken the structure too much. Any suggestions?