[LASS Soaring] Bat Repair!

[Ben Wilson]

I stayed at home last night and cleaned up shop and started on a couple 
of projects - one of which was to re-cover and re-pair my trusty 
WindRider Bat DS wing.  It's been crashed, smashed, pancaked and 
generally treated badly over the last two or three years of flying.  I 
expected to find a battered shell of foam on the inside when I stripped 
the covering off...  but that wasn't the case at all! 

Stripping everything off, I found the foam to be in excellent 
condition.  It was astounding!  A few minor wrinkles here and there, but 
overall it's in excellent shape. 

I gouged out a pocket on the top of the wing to put in another spar - it 
loses too much speed in hard turns, so I wanted to stiffen it up even 
more.  Having worked with some composites in the last few years, I've 
found a lot of people assume that you need a spar cap on the *bottom* of 
a wing to keep it from bending UP, but that's not really the case!  To 
keep it from bending UP you need a cap on the top more than a cap on the 
bottom to keep the foam from compressing... Anyway, I made a 1/4" wide 
pocket, hogged it out with a flat-bladed screwdriver and then used some 
thickened 2-hour epoxy and dropped in another carbon (or maybe just 
black glass) tube.  Checked it this morning and I think that'll do just 
fine!   Also, I've removed the original foam elevons, and will be 
replacing them with balsa and redoing my linkages. 

I've already removed those silly "chicken feet", and I'm going to make a 
new rudder fin that will pop right into my potted slot for it. 

Also I started carving my 2-meter fuselage plug :)

Might get some photos soon...

Ben!