Project overview - finishing up the fuselage

Some more details were finished up like replacing these nutplates, or actually nutblocks.

With newly made ones below:

Due to a leak from a brake master cylinder, some plywood under the fuselage was oiled up. These had to be replaced also. The below image shows one half of this area already replaced, but another half still waiting.

The most critical part of a wooden taildragger is of course the tail, since it has a very good chance of being damaged by water. At least this part of our aircraft failed to surprise us in a negative way. The tail section was absolutly dry and perfect, but to gain access to it, we took down a skin, so this had to be replaced. Small price to pay.

Some repairs also had to be performed elsewhere, but these are just minor things.

And this more or less finishes up the wood work on the fuselage. Through all of this construction phase, a very longlasting process was performed. This strenous thing was removing the revision layer of internal paint. The aircraft was painted internally with two coats of paint. The initial was very durable and a bit lighter in colour, while the second, that was obviously applied during overhaul was darker, but most importantly thicker and much worse in quality. The result was the image below.

So the remedy was to simply sand the paint away. Keep in mind that this is a huge area and it has a lot of nooks and edges. The right part of the picture is sanded, while the left is not.

A frame in the tail area showing the different shades of paint clearly.

Now the positive thing to this sanding business is that you literary go through every square centimeter of the aircraft and discover things that you could overlook. Like this method of how they used nails with a washer made of leather to keep the corner block in position during glueing.

See the sanded off paint on the fuselage bottom. Hard earned grams to take off the basic empty weight.

And this is how the final result looked like. New skins, new corner blocks and the revision paint completly removed.

The biggest effort went into the fusleage aft of the cockpit. Lots of area there and teribile working conditions.

To provide an illustration, this is an image I took of our friend Marko, who is woodmaker, turned historian, whose expertise lies in Slovenian military aviation operation in 1918 and 1919 skirmishes on the Austro-Slovenian border. Teribille work.

But in the end it all paid off. This is a structurally sound and complete fuselage.

After the work was completed, new filler was applied, but only in the areas that the original was present.

Before fabric work was started, some of the fittings had to be realigned to fit the new woodwork.

Here is an image that nicely shows the extent of work done on the fuselage....

But, after paint nothing is visibille. We went to great lenghts to get the shade of the paint matched up with the original layer of paint. It really went well, but more on this later.