It's just a simple thing you can do to remove one risk factor.Â* Take it
for what it's worth and do what you like.

On 3/12/2020 12:09 PM, Eric Greenwell wrote:
The horizontal stabilizer on a glider weighs far more than any of the
tail batteries I've encountered, and when flying the glider,
especially the takeoff and landing, that heavy horizontal puts a lot
more forces (vertically and twisting) on the tail boom than the
battery. In a trailer, the forces are almost entirely vertical, and
are also far less than the landing/takeoff pounding the tail gets. So
I'm skeptical the gel coat cracking is due to the battery during
trailering.

How did Fidel determine it was the battery/trailering, and not the
normal operation of the glider, or some other cause?


Dan Marotta wrote on 3/12/2020 10:06 AM:
Hi Eric,

The advice I got from Fidel was specific to batteries mounted high in
the vertical fin.Â* Think of an inverted pendulum.Â* The visible damage
appears as long cracks in the gel coat partially around the tail boom
at the leading edge of the base of the fin.Â* I wouldn't be surprised
that there would be damage to the underlying structure, but I have no
direct knowledge of that.Â* I doubt there's any mechanical problem
with fuselage mounted batteries, though I always removed mine so that
they'd be fully charged when I arrived at my destination.Â* They were
ease to remove, however.

Dan

On 3/12/2020 8:43 AM, Eric Greenwell wrote:
wrote on 3/12/2020 1:35 AM:
I'll second the recommendation on batteries OUT for trailering.
Especially tail fin installs.

Is that based on gel coat cracking (the original reason for removing
the tail battery), the potential for fires caused by the battery
while trailering, or to protect the battery from damage during
trailering?

Removing the main batteries from a Schleicher motorglider (ASH 26E
and later), and DG motorgliders is very time-consuming. Since I'm
not aware of any problems caused by leaving the main batteries in
during trailering in these gliders, I think removing and replacing
them is likely to cause more problems than it avoids.





--
Dan, 5J