RE: adding flaps to an arf
Well my evergreen p-51d has 30hr of airtime on it and is really showing its age. I’ve stripped it of all covering and found a couple of things I want to comment on.
First – I believe the plane was covered with ultra coat, at least I bought a role of silver/grey/aluminum (SAG, what ever they called) it and it matched exactly. The SAG would curl at the tips al the time to the point I put a strip across the LE, TE, and wing tip to stop it. Then after a while the strip started to curl so when that got bad enough I removed it and layed another fresh strip down. While all this was going on with the SAG the yellow required no maintenance at all, No curling, no tears, no pulled seams. But the most important thing I noticed is that when I removed the covering I got no separation. When removing 4+ year old monokote quite often the color portion of the covering stays with the plane and only the clear Mylar sheet peals up. This would require sanding and/or solvents to remove if a lighter color is going over it. But non of that here! The SAG showed no UV imbritlement while the yellow did on the top side covering.
I knew the right H. stab LE had broken several times I had re-glued it by ironing the covering on the bottom of the stab right to the LE then removing a small sliver right over the crack and filling that with thin CA and let it wick into the wood each time it broke. It turned out that the TE was also broken and as soon as the covering was removed the stab came apart. The wood is really punky and not what I would have picked for a structural member. I still have not decided how to handle this because I do not want to remove the empennage.
The canopy had cracked several times. And deformed very badly from UV light as well. I wrote raiden about replacing the cowl and canopy but have never herd back. So I purchased a flop tite p-40 canopy to turn this into a B, then found the flop tite p-51d to b conversion kit. Oh well.
We have a lot of fuel soaking also.
I’ll post some pic’s when I get them.
Joe