Fuselage CF reinforcements
 

Well, after receiving some requests I finally took some pics of the carbon fiber reinforcements I
used in the Superhotspot... unfortunately, they don´t show up clearly in the pics,and because we simply didn´t had time to take pics during this plane construction, I took now some pics of this same process done in the Roo, while repairing it after a rough landing caused by a flameout.

The improvement in the Roo fuselage was impressive, this plane is old and got flimsy, and after the mods, the fuselage feels like it was carved from solid wood, without a significant weight increase.

The idea is simply to glue a 3 inch wide CF medium cloth in the fuselage sides from tail to nose and about 1/4 diameter perpendicular CF roving glued like "ribs".. also all bulkheads are glued initially with a little amount of epoxy, mostly to keep them in place, and then 1/8 roving with a generous amount of epoxy is applied as a fillet on both sides.

This same roving was applied in the cabin... a impressive improvement was obtained and again without a discernible weight increase... all the CF gluing was done after some light scuffing the fiberglass the fuse interior.

Another change done in the fuse, was lowering the engine thrust line. it was also very simple to do, just with flat pieces of balsa and two lateral plywood mounts. This mod is quite common in
the Roo, but I never saw a clear pic of this in the WWW without the engine installed, so I posted it too. By doing this, I would not be able to make roo flops, but as I plan install on it thrust vectoring, no harm will be done. I guess that this will take a additional fun factor on this old
plane that is still a favorite of mine. ;)

Enrique