farminred

I have a four star 120 that met the ground hard after a radio failure.(that is besides the point.) It is going to be the winter project to rebuild the plane. The plane is aprox 10 years old and needs to be recovered. on some controll surfaces it has CA hinges and others it has the press in or pin style hinges(Robart). what is a safe way to remove these so I can recover the controll surfaces and reinstall the hinges after I am done. this is my favorite plane and I would love to give it new life instead of it looking like it has been crashed a bunch of times.

thanks for all your help

piper_chuck

My Feedback: (12)

Just cut through the hinges. Make new slots in slightly different locations and fill the old ones so they won't show through the covering. Then recover and rehinge.

Campgems

Just make sure you don't place the hinges in a weak spot. A couple of the planes I've built have extra balsa in the area of the hinges and if you move them very far, you will miss the extra strength. Of course with the covering removed, it is easy to add additional balsa if needed.

For what it's worth, I like to hinge before I cover. I would rather work around the hinges than fight loose covering at the hinge.

Don

bkdavy

My Feedback: (1)

I just rebuilt a Nexstar that another club member had trashed. Rather than re-hinge, I used a heat gun and tweezers to remove the covering along the hinge line. When I re-covered, I started with a strip on the hinge line and simply treated it like a monokote hinge, leaving the existing CA hinges in place. No fuss, no muss.

Brad