Skellys Model 2 rebuild

[skelly]

Hi everyone,

I have been meaning to do a blog thing for quite a while now but I have been so busy I never got chance to do it.
So,, during a break in aeroplane building, I have decided to crack on with it.

A bit of back story:

I wanted an aeroplane and nothing really grabbed my attention that was in my price range (not very much)
I looked at all sorts of things and then, one day I discovered a thing called a Kitfox.

I instantly knew that I had to have one and if it fell into the (UK) microlight category that would be a bonus so I had to narrow my search to a model 1 or 2.

After looking around, I discovered that they all seemed to have a 2 stroke engine.
Now, there is nothing wrong with 2 strokes but 3 years of sidecar racing and a general leaning towards 4 strokes made me want one with a 4 stroke engine.

Purely by chance, I discovered a smashed up model 2 at a local airfield that had with it a KFM112M engine which was very obviously a 4 stroke flat 4 engine.
I knew nothing about these engines and ummed and arred and pondered and decided that I had enough experience of engines, motorsport and rebuilding of vintage aero engines to be able to possibly make a decent job of it.

So I bought the project complete with spare wings and lots of other bits.

I'm going to post some photos as soon as I work out how to do it.

Cheers.

Skelly.

[skelly]

33147
Hopefully you can all see this.

[avidflyer]

Picture came through real clear. Tailfeathers look to be at a funny angle... And the one lift strut looks like an after market (not factory standard) model. Two blade prop? as well. That is where a lot of these projects begin, and in the end they are nice flying and looking planes. Stick with it. You will smile when it flys again. JImChuk

[skelly]

Cheers Jim,
Yes, I am sticking with it.
Below (hopefully) are some more pics of the hideous mess.
Something that wasn't obvious was the wing internals.
It actually had model 3 wings with the stronger drag brace ends and the later spars with the slide in internal stiffener which was great but unfortunately whoever built the wings had put the internal stiffeners in at all sorts of funny angles.
It really was a mess.
331483314933150

[Eric Page]

Thanks for posting those photos. They make me feel a bit better about the state of my kit when I brought it home! You've got your work cut out for you; that poor thing needs some real TLC.

[skelly]

Hey Eric,

Yes, it was in a very sorry state.
Luckily I got the rear end from another Kitfox to graft on to my existing fuselage and was able to repair the front carrythrough tube.
Much measuring and laser levelling later I had all 4 longerons joined also.
All joints were done in accordance with AC43.13 etc.
The joints on the longerons were all staggered in the spirit of engineering correctness.
New diagonal tubes were fitted and the whole job was welded up.
331613316233163

[skelly]

When I did a trial fit of the engine I was quite happy with the engine bearer and general line up.
However, when I came to fit the carburettor I discovered that it fouled one of the diagonal tubes at the front of the fuselage so a plan was devised to cut these out and replace them with 2 vertical tubes and slightly 'enhance' the front tube arrangement.
This allows a decent size airbox to be fitted and also made things easier when fitting the firewall and bottom fabric.33164

[skelly]

Once everything was double checked, the fuselage went off for blasting, etch priming and painting in epoxy.
Luckily some spare wooden stringers were part of the deal so they were cleaned up and fitted then coated in yacht varnish.
33165331663316733168