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A Good Flight
THE PRANG
Well, its been quite a few weeks (perhaps that should be months looking back at the video) since I had the misadventure of pranging my Stearman Biplane and the poor old thing has been languishing in the corner of the hanger ever since.
I knew the landing gear was badly bent, the motor mount loose & one of the wing struts broken but other than that it all looked OK.
Landing gear was easily fixed once removed from the plane and it wont take much work to make a new “W” wing strut out of some styrene sheet but once the motor cowling was removed I realised the firewall/engine mount was trashed. 3 of the 4 mounting posts had punched through the firewall and severely split it. Nothing else to do but remove all the damaged ply & build a new firewall to remount the quite large motor on to.
The original firewall appears to be a 3mm ply front plate (that fits flush to the fuselage) laminated onto a 2mm rear plate that is slightly smaller & fits inside the fuselage.
Firewall removed
The Remnants
Landing gear repaired
Now to start cutting ply !!
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Several weeks ago Uncle G volunteered his lathe skills to cut the 2 x 3mm ply discs (they were a perfect fit Uncle G – thanks muchly) I needed to rebuild the firewall on the Stearman bipe. They have been sitting on the workbench ever since waiting for some non flying (read crap) weather.
This week the weather was pretty much all crap so first job was to finish installing the iNAV flight controller in the BumbleBee (the jury is still out on that one – no doubt the first flight will be the decider), second was to re-assemble the Islander BN2 with a new receiver & stabiliser ready for a test flight or sale (whichever comes first)
Finally today it was the Stearman’s turn.
First job was to finish tidying up the fuselage where the firewall attached.
Next was to cut all the notches into the inner ply disc so it would attach over the various spars etc then it was time to epoxy the the 2 ply sheets together & drill the various required holes etc, also installed the 4 captive nuts for the motor to mount onto.
Next was to epoxy the new firewall to the fuselage.
It’s definitely looking better already so now just waiting for the epoxy to set and reassembly can start.
Hopefully she will be ready to take to the skies again by the time the weather improves.
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New Wing Strut made from 2mm Styrene sheet (should be stronger & lighter than ply) and the wings are now back on.
Only the engine cowling to repair now & she is good to fly again.
Hope all you other pilots out there with damaged planes have been putting this past week of winter weather to good use & getting a few repairs done ready to get back in the air SOON.
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