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Sunday, March 15, 2015

RadioCarbonArt Glider Repair Lab serie

Glider Repair Lab chapter 1

This is the first chapter of a serie of 3 films produced by Paul Naton / Radiocarbonart. Each film is around 2 hours long and deal with composite glider repairs. In the first film, a first subject largely covered is about everything you need to repair, from the glue (both epoxy or cyano), Fiberglass / carbon / kevlar fabrics, tools, primers and fillers, paint. Then GRL#1 explains how to repair a foam core bagged wing delamination, hollow core leadgin edge damage, fuselage repairs and reinforcement, and light hollow core and rohacell tail repair.
In addition to advises, Paul gives nice hint and tips like how to absorb resin in excess, how to retrieve foam core shape, what to check, how a quick fix can be done. For this first chapter, repairs remain basic with the goal to give confidence to a composite repair beginner (I'm consider myself in this category:) )
I found the video clear and well explained, a very good introduction to composite repair technics !

Glider Repair Lab chapter 2

The second chapter assumes GRL1 has been assimilated, so is going to the next level of composite repair. among repairs explained, a broken in multiple part F3J fuselage, an heavily damage F5J wing, covering all the steps (and they are many, how to fill cracks, re-glue drag spars, recreate a root rib, install new incidence pins, reinforce weak points) from the close inspection to the final painting, followed at the end by a flight. I can easily imagine the satisfaction to fly a gain such plane given the condition it was before the repair. Nice job, nice tutorial and again well filmed and edited video.



Glider Repair Lab chapter 3

The last chapter is focusing on a broken spar repair, small delams on a tail and fixation reconstruction and reinforcement, and a fin repair. Then Paul explains how to fix a F5J composite + ribs and solarfilm center wing pannel, then a front nose total reconstruction using lost foam technic. The video finishes on a slope composite plane repair, both fuselage and bagged wing delamination.

Overall, the 3 video are very complementary, with the objective to raise your level of confidence and skills. Even if in Europe some of the products demonstrated are not available (I'm thinking about the fillers), we can easily find some equivalent. As with all films drom Radio carbonart, the quality is very professional.

Today, the delivery time of spare part can be very long depending of the plane as often the production cannot follow the demand. Mastering repair technics is therefore a plus to maintain our expensive plane in good condition, and restore them if needed. Of course the best solution remains to not crash ... but we never know !

You can buy each video separately, but the video set deal is more interesting from my point of view (it corresponds to 6 hours of instructional video).

Best buy deal:  http://www.radiocarbonart.com/GRLDD3Set/





These are the Youtube previews video links:

GRL#1 preview:  https://youtu.be/X-85e8Kzsrk
GRL#2 preview:  https://youtu.be/wo0kvhjt0TQ
GRL#3 preview:  https://youtu.be/i4ek4PsnXik

1 comment:

  1. I've bought these videos a couple of months ago, and started watching them 3 days ago.
    They are really well done, as other videos from radiocarbonart, and really useful, almost when you are wondering

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