Center section

With the fuselage more or less structuraly complete, this is a good time to present the work on the center section.
If you see a few post below, we removed the center section due to the water damage seen on the front side of the aft spar. So this is the thing removed and standing on its nose.

The first surprise was, that the whole center section was painted before being mated to the fuselage. This is evident by the original air force colour on the backside of the rear sspar. Looks like PR blue.

Of course the other thing is that this means that after the factory assembly, the airplane was never really taken apart...But anyway. The first thing was to remove the bottom plywood and see the extent of the damage. This is an image looking at the bottom of the center section and the rear spar is at the top. As you can see, this is the area where most of the damage is located.

Somewhere along the last 30 years the aircraft was for sure parked in the open and is probably leaked a bit through the cockpit seal. Therefore the water acumulated in the rear of the center section, where the design didn't have any drain holes at all. Therefore we started removing the rotten parts. The first face of the spar went off right away and it was also clear that the first pair of ribs will have to be removed.

The good news was that the hardwood of the spar was only discoloured and in some places the wood glue joint was delaminated, which is all in all, quite an easy fix.

The ribs were less fun to look at:

Another thing to notice on the image above - see how ''careful'' and ''good'' they were at factory when varnishing the plywood.
Now, the pair of No.1 ribs was made up quite quickly as seen from the sequence below.

And then, we ground to halt for more then a year on the center section. Why? Check back later.
Don't worry, the story has a happy ending (I think).