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[October 7, 2014]


The right wingtip came out almost as good as the left one. It is about 1/16" deflected on the end. Not perfect, but 100% better than it was! If you look closely, the gap is almost consistent until the inboard side of the wingtip. I might be able to fix this by just sanding down the inboard side of the wingtip.


I had some time to kill, so I thought I'd fix my original vertical stabilizer tip. Way back 4 years ago, I used some styrofoam to make the tips. Well, that didn't hold up so well. In the first 100 or so hours, it cracked fairly easily. Today I removed the styrofoam from the tip - look how in tact it came out! I am guessing this is from my complete lack of composite knowledge back when I built this. It was a perfect rainy night to get started on fixing this tip.


I cleaned out the inside of the tip and mounted it to the vertical stabilizer.


I traced the tip cutout into a piece of 3/8" balsa wood.


The very rough cutout. If you look closely at the bottom of the tip, you can see where I recessed the balsa wood for where it interfered with the nutplates.


After a few dozen iterations of trimming it, it fit relatively well.


I taped up the vertical stabilizer to prevent any unnecessary spilled and used a thick flox epoxy mixture to hold the balsa to the tip. I did it in place to make sure the tip was being held in its optimal position. The balsa cutout was a little on the small side for the cutout, so if I would of tried to do this off of the airplane, it would of possibly reshaped the tip.


While leaving the airport I saw a B-24 "Witchcraft" sitting on the tarmac. I took the liberty of getting an up close and personal look at this war hero.

Brief History:






The aircraft was delivered to the 467th at Wendover AAF, Utah and was assigned to the crew of 2/Lt. George W. Reed who susequently flew it by the Air Transport Command Southern Ferry Route from Florida to Brazil to Dakar then to England. Departing Florida on 29 February 1944 and arriving at Station 145, Rackheath, England on 19 March 1944. The aircraft was flown on 130 Combat Missions by various crews without an early return or having any crewman injured or killed on the missions. It flew on the first Group Mission on 10 April 1944 and also the last Group Mission on 25 April 1945. The aircraft was returned to the Zone of the Interior in June 1945 were it was subsequently salvaged.


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