Is it a bird, is it a plane?

It’s 28AAD, my French Weedhopper! It’s been standing outside in the same place without even having been uncovered once ever since I put it to bed back in October of last year before starting work on my tool store, so going on for 11 months. What with all the planning work I then had to do for the renovation and extension of my house, getting the X-Air ready to sell (very slowly…) and now the windscreen work for 77ASY, I haven’t had the time or the motivation to do any work on it at all, really.

But while I’m waiting for items for the Savannah’s windscreen and to see if the repair that I did yesterday on the X-Air’s prop does fully cure (the signs are encouraging*) I thought now was the time to take the cover off 28AAD, see how it fared over the winter and tackle the repairs it needs to its pod. Here are some shots that I took immediately after removing its cover.

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So all very good. No nasties and just looking a little bit more grubby than the last time I looked at it, which will only take a short time and a little bit of elbow grease to deal with. But my main concern was its pod, and it was here that I received a very pleasant surprise.

28AAD’s pod has a small dent just below the screen on the right hand side that could have happened at any time and may not be connected at all with when its undercarriage collapsed. In any case, I’d decided to leave it alone because it isn’t very noticeable and ‘repairing’ it from my experience would probably make it worse. No, what I was concerned with was that the pod had been compressed on that side by the floor when the main vertical tube connecting the main axle to the top (main) tube on that same side had snapped when the undercarriage had rotated backwards when it had collapsed.

My idea was to clean the paint off the affected area inside the pod, pull the pod wall upwards into shape again and apply some mat and epoxy on the inside wall that would provide the stiffness needed to retain the pod wall in the correct profile.

But when I placed the pod on the grass, I was pleasantly surprised to find that none of this will be necessary, as the following pics show.

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It appears that the pod wasn’t permanently damaged when the undercarriage collapsed but instead the deformity was a result of having been left in its compressed state for several weeks, or months, before I acquired the aircraft. By removing the pod and leaving it to stand since last October, the pod has had the opportunity to return all by itself to its original profile, which for me is great news.

Now all I’ll have to do is deal with a few minor splits on the bottom of the pod that are just the results of normal usage, as I found when I repaired MYRO’s pod the first time. This shouldn’t take very long at all, so that’s what I think I’ll do over the next few days. That’ll then mean that I’ll actually be able to begin the process of rebuilding 28AAD, a process that I should be able to get completed well before the winter if the weather continues to play ball. That is a prospect that I really do look forward to. There might even be enough room next to 77ASY in the barn at Malbec for me to complete the work there if necessary, and if so that would be total luxury!

*Scratch that out, it was a disaster. It didn’t cure properly so I’ve now cleaned the repair off and having bought some, what I hope will be, better material this afternoon, I’ll try again tomorrow. And while it’s working I’ll also have some time to do things on 28AAD 😉