Even minor issues take time and effort

I do enjoy a bit of creative woodbutchery, find it very relaxing. I have to limit the time I spend looking through the Woodcraft catalog… the latest catalog comes out next week, it will probably prove to be expensive… 🙁

THe Hawkridge Dagling not much has happend for a number of years. Other gliders have been worked on first for customers. But it may be worked on again after the Kite 1.

Dave

^^
What he said.

And I just wanted to build a mini-Spitfire!

That wing is beautiful. I don’t even want to guess the number of hours in there!

The new wings for the Kirby Kite 1.

Dave

:applause: What an eye opening thread.Of course you now have to factor in that the skilled workforce and qualified people are getting fewer in the old ways .

Good to see you’re enjoying the thread.

G-ASEA: yes I hope the next Kite will be airborne soon. Dagling next? THAT would be rare as hen’s teeth to see in the air!
ZRX61: Ten Kay seems to capture the costs involved in running warbirds. Never ceases to amaze me how much work they require to just keep tidy, let alone restore. Great thing about wooden frames is that materials come relatively cheap. Not so great thing is that the work involved tends to be quite time consuming (but fun!).

As a bonus to the thread a picture of a major rebuild of an A-frame for a primary glider. We had a visitor drop by one day who was really into vintage aircraft. When giving him a quick tour of the shop, he dutifully recorded every aircraft in his little book but never noticed that the big wooden frame in the corner was actually an aircraft too… Just goes to show some rebuilds start with such a dismantling job that aircraft are no longer recognizable as aircraft!

Very enjoyable thread, well done Eric.

Cool thread, thx

Great post.
Hopefully a “learning moment” for those here (who you would think would know better) who underestimate the amount of work it takes to keep old aircraft flying.

Eric,

The restoration of my Slingsby Kirby Kite prototype took us 7 years. My other Kite should not that long I hope.

Dave

The last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time…… & the original time/cost estimate of 100 hrs/$10k will end up being 200hrs & $30k… We had a P51 owner suggest renaming the business “Ten Kay Aviation” because every time he walked into the hangar it ended up costing him $10k. We thought about it.. 🙂

Thanks for sharing, amazing how much effort it takes to care for a wooden airframe.

Nice job Eric.

I salute you Sir! I had no idea such a simple sounding thing could be so time consuming.

So, by this time we’re around 190 man hours down the road. And that’s the rudder fixed. By then, only the remainder of the airframe had to undergo a full glue failure survey, which was partially done with a boroscope, partially invasive by cutting a number of holes in the fabric. No further issues were found and the holes duly patched. Then just the annual to do, which had lapsed.

Moral of the story is that a small job often turns out big. And there’s more work going on behind the scenes to keep these oldies flying than you may know. Happy landings!

Which just leaves trial fitting (pfew, it still fits!), and covering it. Oh yes, and the doping, basing, spraying, weight & balance and a mountain of paperwork….

Then it was just a question of putting the D-nose plywood back on. There’s a couple of tricky scarf joints in there too so there were four sections to be done… Add to that the curves around the hinges – which had to be refurbished first with all hardware replaced – and it took a fair amount of time before it was back to its old structural self.

From here on it was time to put all the new bits in. A new spar web was spliced in on a custom-built jig. Sounds fancy, but we just made this to ensure it came out straight after the repairs. Then it was time to replace the two D-nose ribs that were beyond saving. And put all of them back onto the new spar web and properly conserve the wood with yellow dope.

The bad section of spar was stripped. In order to repair this, practically the whole D-nose ply needed to come off. And the D-ribs. This is what was left when the bad bits had been removed.