More work tonight

First thing tonight, Leah and I took the rest of the fabric off the fuselage. This involved removing the nose skid and the tailwheel. The fabric came off with no problems and as far as I can tell the wood underneath is in fine condition.

Then I set to work on the vertical stabilizer. Like the rudder it has (had) a Balsa cap on it and like the rudder that Balsa had taken a beating. So I cut it off! Sanded down to the varnish finish underneath and did some work on getting that varnish up so I can glue some new balsa directly to the wood underneath. I did get a little carried away and gouged into the wood a bit but its not the end of the world and can be repaired. Here is a picture of the vertical, sans balsa, before gouge:


I ran out to Harry's tonight and picked up the Rudder. He had been nice enough to unclamp it for me and had a sanding block, chisel, and plane ready for me to shape the balsa up. It looks great! I did end up with one small chip on the trailing edge but a little filler will take care of that no problem.


Still nothing from Stewarts, hopefully tomorrow...

I added a picture of N14ET to the Roll Call post. Forgot I had that one laying around. Also, I've got copies of old Cherokee II Newsletters along with some of the instructional writing and photos that were sent with the original Cherokee II plans, on a monster PDF file. Most reasonable way to distribute this will be me burning it onto a CD and mailing it to you. So if you are interested, let me know! Email at abcondon@gmail.com