Posted Saturday, February 29, 2020 @ 08:01 PM  

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I have covered four other aircraft and they turned out quite well. The fabric on the Fournier was in decent shape, but the paint was not. 4114 had been painted with with automotive paint (Imron) and with every tiny flexing of the structure another chip or three would sucomb to the wind. As a test, I tried pulling the fabric off the rudder. It was easy enough. It came off cleanly and left a dull, pristine surface ready for a light sanding and a coat of varnish. I committed to the recover.

Then I moved on to the fuselage, fin and horizontal stabilzer and it all started to go horribly wrong. The previous person appeared to have painted the fuselage on top of the original paint and cotton fabric, while the the tail surfaces had Imron on bare wood! No wonder it was flaking. Removing even the smallest area was an exercise in frustration. The paint was stuck like you-know-what to a blanket and no chemical at my disposal would remove it. Heat was too dangerous and sanding it both a heath hazard and really hard work.

It was incredibly slow going. Scraping, softening, warming, sanding, stripping a layer at a time until I got down to the cotton, then acetone for the final couple of layers. This work took place over the course of a couple of years during which I was working on other aircraft, flying the Jungmann, moving house and working for a living, but finally it is done. The whole aircraft is now stripped and clean, ready for its first coat of epoxy varnish.

Once that is done, I plan to cover it with Oratex fabric. I have been communicating with Bob Grimstead and with the US dealer and will be ordering the supplies in the next week or so. I have not used the process before, but I am confident it will work well on the Fournier. Above all it will not fill the house with obnoxious fumes and I may still have a happy spouse at the end of the process.

This is the design I am contemplating. I hope it retains the theme of the original, but does not plaster my registration letters in a huge font on the side of the fuselage. I have enough trouble maintaining any sort of privacy without that

Posted Monday, March 2, 2020 @ 06:23 PM  

Your proposed design looks good but I just feel very strongly that the sensual leading edge-like profile just above the wing root is such a classy looking feature of the RF 4. If you just retain that it looks like a real Fournier regardless of how you choose to paint the rest. Below a picture of how I found my 4 sitting on the tarmac at the Bicester Aerodrome in the UK and I think it was the curvy lines or to be more specific that particular line that made me fall headlessly and helplessly in Love!

May the 4's be with you/ Jörgen

Posted Saturday, March 21, 2020 @ 03:23 PM  

These paper templates are to scale and used to calculate the amount of (expensive) fabric required.

The fabric has been ordered. Now I need to wait to it arrive from far away Alaska.

Now with the coves, tip and trailing edge skins painted.

In theory a single piece of fabric should wrap around the leading edge being glued very throughly to the trailing edges, then trimmed with a sharp blade. We'll see how theory meets practice in a later episode