[bobmarkert]

While inventorying my wing kit I discovered what I thought was severe damage to the spar. I sent some pics to vans and they said it was from a grinder used to remove a scratch and was OK! If that is true I was waaaaaay to paranoid about smoothing the edges and lighting holes when I built the tail! I am considering buying a dye penetrate kit to check it further. Are there any issues with dye penetrate reacting with the anodized coating? I still can?t believe this is ok, so how about a second and third opinion from you guys.

If I did this correctly, click on the link below to go to the pics then use the arrow at the top to step through the pics

http://picasaweb.google.com/Bobmarkert/Wings/photo?authkey=a4AB0jpV24s#5208609166634562322

Thanks
Bob Markert
RV8 slooooow build
N747BM
303 882-7410
Littleton, CO

 

[bullojm1]

Pretty normal occurrence, here is a pic of what mine looked like:

 

[asav8tor]

I wouldn't like that either; I guess the primary concern is: Does that repair compromise the integrity of the spar?

I'm confident the answer is no. The mill steps on the top and bottom of the spars are points of stress, those web rework areas are not aligned with the mill steps. And even if they were I still don't think it would be an issue. In the overall scheme of 10,000 things to worry about you can toss that one and move on. Damage or rework to the milled bars could be a very different story.

On photo 3of4 it looks like they really didn't do that great of job, I still see the original scratch and it could have been smoothed out better. Does it matter? No.

I wouldn't bother with the dye. That would be something to do after many fatigue cycles checking for cracks. Not going to find them now. If it ever did crack there I still don't think it could become a failure mode for the spar. By that time those repairs will long be forgotten and gas will be $50/gal and the airframe will be in a museum or scrapped. (hopefully 100 years from now or more)

Still very annoying to find something like that.

 

[Mel]

I wouldn't worry.

Almost all of the spar loads are carried by the spar caps, not the web. The primary purpose of the spar web is to keep the caps in alignment.