Quite a few years ago my brother kindly purchased me a Veron Domino glider kit for my birthday. This was the same glider I built many years ago when I was a teenager, so it was a delight to be able to re-live the building experience all over again.
The Domino is an A1 free flight glider, all-balsa (Jedelsky) construction sporting a decent 1190mm wingspan. I took the liberty to give it a all-white gloss finish which turned out to be a rather winning look. Unfortunately the glider was temporarily moved to the garage while our house underwent a rather radical loft conversion and got slightly damaged when a board fell on it. I waited a year before looking at the damage as I really didn't want to face up to seeing how damaged the glider was.
Fortunately, the solid balsa wing lends itself to fixing fairly easily. There were two breaks, one across the main left leading edge and the right wing tip had snapped off just above the join to the main wing. I administered suitable amounts of wood adhesive and used some stretchy insulating tape to hold the join while drying. A few books were used to set the wing tip dihedral while the glue set.
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| Wing tip wedged between books while drying |
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| Linux device drivers books come in quite handy |
The main fuselage was broken in the same place my original snapped, so I guess this is a fundamental design flaw. The fuselage is solid balsa, so it was a simple case of drilling two holes in each part and inserting a 4 inch dowel to reinforce the joint.
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| After gluing. I need to find some paint to finish it off. |
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| Fuselage and tailplane need some cleaning. |
Hopefully when I get some calm evening weather I will take it out for a quick flight to see if my fixes are adequate. I will report back.
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