Wildthing Rebuild

So now the rebuild on the Polecat is finished, it's time to move on and rebuild my trusty Wildthing. The Thing was the second slope glider I purchased after only flying slope for the first time 2 months previously. The maiden was on the Wrecker slope at the Bwlch back in June 2012, I think. What a slope to maiden a model on, especially when you're a newbie at flying gliders.

So I began by stripping the packing and GF tape covering from the fuselage so that I could see the true extent of the damage, and yes, the fuse had broken into two pieces.

The piece on the right had also split for about half its length, so I've glued that back together.

I've ordered some UHU POR to join the two halves together as it is naturally elastic in nature once it has set. So once that has arrived I will use wooden cocktail sticks pushed into both halves of the foam to re-enforce the join before gluing them together.

So as I couldn't do anything else to the fuse, I stripped the vinyl covering off the wing but left on the GF tape. My plan is to cover the wing in Easycover, a cheap iron on film, then cover this with 42 micron, (really thin) laminate film. This will provide stiffness and protection for the covering but with minimal weight increase.

So this evenings job is to remove the elevons from the wing and strip the black packing tape from them. The GF tape hinging is showing signs of degradation so I want to renew this.

I have some black HK iron on film which I will apply to the underside of the wing once I have re-attached the elevons, then I just have to wait until I've taken delivery of the yellow Easycover before I can continue.