How many cracks can a wood chuck crack?

So......say a friend was building a 7, and HE was working on the F-770 fuse skin and bending the conical bend.....and HIS skin cracked at the common area...........Ok did I mess this up? or is this something that happens a lot, and am I buying a new skin? Just looking for input before I call the mother ship in the morning. I am so depressed right now.

I've never heard of a crack there. If it is small enough, you might be able to make a repair, but if I was you, I'd order a new skin. No sense knowingly building a $100 mistake into a $75k airplane.

new skin...

don't fret... you will have a nice piece of sheet to harvest for lots of uses as you move forward... ask me how I know

[email protected] said:

don't fret... you will have a nice piece of sheet to harvest for lots of uses as you move forward... ask me how I know

Click to expand...

No....tell me, is this common? I have seen this on a few build sites, I am looking to see what is acceptable and what is not. I mean really, they can bend the tail section skin and not this one? Just venting, this just happened. I need a Beer.

Stop drill the crack and build on. Fill the hole with some proseal. I had to do that on one side of the fuselage. The crack was very superficial (tiny) right at the 90 degree bend.

Bret,

My QB fuselage came from the factory with a crack at that location on both sides. The cracks were only about 1/16" long, so my solution was to just enlarge the existing relief hole with a small grinding bit in a Dremel tool to completely eliminate the crack.

So, I'd say, if it's already riveted up and the crack is very short like mine was, you may want to consider my solution.

Or if it's already riveted up and the crack is longer than you'd want to grind out, consider stop-drilling as Bruce suggested.

Or if it's not riveted up yet, then buying a new skin as others have suggested also shouldn't be too painful. But if it is already riveted up, then I'd make that only the last resort, if you really can't get a satisfactory result with one of the first two options.

And yeah, step back, relax, and have a beer. No biggie. Whatever approach you decide to take, you'll fix it and move on. Par for the course.

When this happened, vans said as in the above post, either stop drill or file back the area behond the crack. Then put some pro seal in after its assembled. As my crack was only at the edge I filed the area away.
6 years and 300 hours no further cracking and no-one has ever noticed te extra I filed off.
Don't kick yourself I'm sure there is a lot of people who have had the same problem.

Peter

As stated above, I filed mine back with a round file. Not noticeable. Build on after the repair.

Last night I did the other side to see if I was buying one or two skins, but first I opened up the hole at the rear of the bend with a round 5/32 file, that one came out fine. I am glad to hear I am not alone on this. Thanks for the replies. Bret