On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 12:05:52 -0500, Don Hammer wrote:

Some years ago I repaired a Pawnee that had a similar steel plate on
the front spar. Because of the steel on aluminum, there was extensive
corrosion between and the aluminum rivets were soft enough you could
pick off the heads of the #6 rivets with your finger nail.

From the looks of the photo, there is lots of rust, meaning water.
Aluminum + steel + water = battery = corrosion. If it were mine, I'd
take it apart and look to see what is going on. If the aluminum is
corroded under the steel, you could get cracks under normal loads.

Don
A&P - IA

Don,

We've looked at it pretty closely. There is no corrosion involved.
And no sign of water infiltration. That was pretty clear from the
thick layer of dry dust all over the surrounding area -- I should post
another picture after vacumming the area out.

And worse yet, there are two cherry-rivets in the damaged area (you
can see one of them in the picture). That means that after the damage
- some "maintainer" bent the metal brace back down and stuck a couple
of cherry-rivets in it. Nope, he didn't bother to follow 43.13 and
repair it properly -- he just did a half-assed sorta-fix. And of
course -- he didn't make any mention of it in the logs.

Now -- it looks like I get to pay a DRE for a repair plan, probably
cut that brace a few inches away, get a replacement plate fashioned,
and splice it in. And probably pay a ton for a IA to do a bunch of
dye-penatrant testing while we're at it to insure there was no other
damage.

The thing that really ticks me off is I paid to have a prebuy/annual
done before purchasing the aircraft. With all this expense on a
pre-existing condition that should have been identified (we spotted it
FIRST time we looked under the back seat) -- I'm going back after the
IA who did the prebuy/annual. He's either going to help pay for this
repair -- or he can answer questions from the FAA.


Chuck