Work commenced on repairing the Sukhoi SU31 this week (01/08/07). With other projects running hot, starting this repair took a back seat. The easy repairs have been carried out first.

The cockpit canopy was cracked in 2 places, so a coat of epoxy to the inside and some clear tape on the outside saw that done. A new wing spar was needed as the original snapped on both sides where the wings meet the fuselage. The landing gear needed a scrub up as it was covered in mud.

Moving on to the fuselage proved to be a slow repair process. It looks like I will have to make each piece that's missing using the TLAR method to reconstruct it. Below is a picture of the front end before I started repairs.

The front end is completely useless to me as every piece is broken so I decided to simply cut it all off and rebuild the whole lot. Here's an image of the parts I had to work with. As you can see - there is not much point glueing all that back together again.

I repaired the fuse walls above the wing area and strengthened some of the sidewall areas which had been split from the crash with ply strips.

I pieced together what the fuse parts should look like from the original scraps and made a new former, firewall and fuse sides. I managed to salvage the motor mount box as that stayed in tact from the crash and glued a new mount to the front of it, so the front end still has an original piece in use now. I added another layer of 2mm ply to the landing gear plate as the original seems just too thin to hold the screws in place on a heavy landing.

Just some balsa wedges to glue and sand to the underneath of the fuse to allow the LG plate to meet the fuse nicely and then I can move onto covering the repairs with some fresh solarfilm. This went well and after remounting the Landing Gear the model is now ready to have the R/C gear installed.

The rebuild continues...