On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:46:18 -0700, Eric Greenwell wrote:

Mark James Boyd wrote:

Stay away from wooden gliders. You don't know if they've
had "good care" or "proper storage" in the past, and
this may be very hard to determine.

All aircraft can suffer from improper care and storage. That's why you
inspect them.

I'm reminded of the Citabrias guys with all the inspection
holes in their wings. It didn't matter if you kept
yours in a super dry hanger its whole life, and never flew it.


We had a Citabria that neeeded inspection. As I recall, the AD wasn't
due to rot, but some Citabrias were found to have damaged spars.
Eventually, but after lots of Citabrias were inspected, it was found
that some (all?) of the original ones that started the AD were damaged
by things like blowing over and not having repairs done, or not logged.
I don't think it was primarily a wood issue in the end. We had to
replace some little nails.

The wooden AD meant you had to cut holes in the
wings.

Hey, it was just fabric. Easy to do, easy to fix. Try that with a metal
or fiberglass glider.

Wood doesn't fatigue like metal or fiberglass, but the metal fittings
can. These are easy to inspect. Regardless, you should have whatever you
buy inspected first by a person that knows the material and the aircraft.

AFAIK fibreglass doesn't suffer from fatigue either
In Australia there has been an ongoing fatigue test on a Janus wing,
with no detectable deterioration over many thousands of hours of
testing.
Cheers, John G.