How to Fix a Foam Airplane - ARWing Pro Flying Wing Repair

so uh guess the joke's on me it's the first day in about a month and a half that there's absolutely no wind and uh here I am outside in my backyard getting ready to repair my destroyed AR Wing Pro which I took out last week when it was really windy try to do a maiden and it worked until it crashed so let's just take a look at some of the damage here we have a piece of foam missing from there that's going to need to be put back in cracked along here this whole part of the top of the fuselage split from the bottom part of the fuselage so I need to glue that back in place it's cracked here so I'll need to fix that there is a crack in there so I will need to fix that chunk missing from the bottom will need to be replaced and over here on the side the bulkhead is also split pretty severely right through it's just split from the top half from the bottom so I'm going to have to put that back into place and glue it in so overall I believe it's going to be recoverable it's just going to take a little bit of work and some some of our good friend here E6000 so I'm not sure if it's going to be very easy for me to film doing all of the gluing and that so I probably won't but at least you'll get a sense of what I've needed to do um if there's something particularly interesting or tricky maybe I'll take some photo of it but overall it's just mostly going to be reattaching everything making sure that it's straight and that the seams are sealed properly we can we can make it work let's crack out some glue and uh try not to get too high so I guess to start with what I'm going to do is show you the things that I'm using to actually do the repairs and kind of maybe give you some ideas about what things you could use your if you crash and you have to do a repair your damage is going to be different than mine but some of these things will uh at least give you a good idea of how you can go about doing some of the repairs and some of the things you're going to want to do and perhaps some of the things you're going to want to avoid if you take a look right here I've got a few sort of pointy Cutty objects here it's just a what I call a Bodkin it's just a long needle that I can use for picking things out I had a few pieces of of wood that were actually embedded in a little deeply in the foam and so using the the pin here and and a pair of tweezers I was able to do a little bit of cleaning out and the same with a a blade like this it's just to to clean out damage to smooth things over just as an example here you can see on the model here for me this is a very rough area and when I'm doing the repair I'm just going to need to take the X-Acto blade here and just level it out a little bit so that when I go back to put the pieces in place they they meet up properly this is not really intended for going and cutting things straight you you don't really want to do that you're going to want to keep the foam as close to the shape that you found it in because it will fit back in more accurately that way and fit very well as for glue you should be using E6000 um it's flat out going to be the best choice to do this there is another product out there called goop which would be similar but it's a different different kind of glue it will work and it won't damage the foam so you could use that but this clear transparent E6000 is really what you're going to want to use um do not use hot glue do not use uh Crazy Glue Crazy Glue will just melt the foam and hot glue well it's hot it will melt the glue and it's actually fairly brittle and and doesn't do the job right now along with that you're going to want to have paper towels not toothpicks for doing this you're going to want something that's a little bit longer as a skewer if you're trying to deal with stuff in here with little toothpicks you're just going to get it all over your hand and it's just going to be a mess working with the e6000. you're also going to want to have a little place like this so you can take your really goopy skewers when you're halfway through what you're doing and be able to put them down so that the excess glue will drip off while you are you know trying to put the piece of foam back in place that you just applied the glue to you're going to want to have a place to put that to drip off once you get into the process of actually doing the gluing and putting the pieces back in place um or in my case I had to re-glue the actual physical top top half of the fuselage back to the bottom half it just split cleanly right down the middle you need something to hold it in place you're going to need to be able to in a sense clamp it and hold that in place as you're doing the repair the glue is not an instant set it sets moderately quickly but it doesn't just grab and then hold in that place if you let it go it will slowly loosen and so you need to be able to fold it in place and there are a bunch of different ways that you can do it um the thing that you can see as I switch over here to the other camera again you can see that I've got a lot of tape on this one that's because for me based on the kind of damage that I had using this tape which is painters tape okay was a really really good way to do this now this is what is called painters tape it is a very low tack tape which means it doesn't stick really really hard and so it actually peels off as you can see I'm doing right here peels off very easily and does not leave much behind on the tape and you can see it doesn't leave much behind on the foam at all either but it sticks really really well and holds in place so depending on the kind of damage if you're just looking to perhaps you know take two things and hold them like that wrapping tape over it this way will do that so that's what I've done in a lot of places through here I've just used tape to take from the top to the bottom and squeeze them together and hold them in place alternatively and I needed to do this what I'm going to talk about next I needed to do it on the front here but if you look right here you can see a little after effect of the repair and that's because what I needed to do was in order to get rid of this got compressed and in order to get rid of the compression I needed to use some clamps to flatten things out this is foam these are clamps they will absolutely completely crush the foam just started by gluing the Balsa back together they cracked in the nose cone at least the parts that I could find and then we'll go from there once that sets at least the bottom half of it will be rigid again and then I can start reattaching the top in its various pieces what I have to do is replace the the balsa wood except in this case it's not Balsa now it's a piece of pine from a wooden ruler that I had kicking around that actually is just by chance exactly the right width and it fits in there just perfectly after I you know cut it properly to the right shape but in my case because of the damage that happened there's a nice big gap here between the wood and the and the foam now because things kind of got compressed and and the shape changed and so what I'm going to have to do is along with the E6000 I'm going to have to use a pretty heavy duty clamp on there to get that together but of course this open cell foam and a heavy clamp like this don't really go along together so well the clamp will crush this foam and so what I've also got is a piece of for lack of a better term sacrificial foam here this is closed cell foam and it's really really dense it's the stuff that our Electronics typically comes packaged in and so what I'll do is I'll place it on the bottom here and so when the clamp is on which I can't really do very well with only one hand you're doing it it's going to clamp on the wood and it's going to clamp on this foam and so any damage that the clamp might do will be done to this foam and not actually the model and it will just distribute that and put the pressure all the way up so that those those will meet better so you can see how much pardon me the clamp is actually crushing this foam that's why it's called sacrificial foam it's taking all the damage and it's still putting a lot of force up through there and the other part of the clamp is on the wood so it's doing no damage to the foam too and you get a very tight clamp and you can see now that it's all meshed up and that E6000 is having a proper chance to do what it needs to do the other thing that you can also use are and I'm going to try to get a nice picture of it here um let's see if I can zoom in on that a little bit better what are called straight pins and it's just a pin that people would use typically with sewing um to hold Fabric in place when they're sewing but in this case for example I have a piece that I need to replace back here in the nose cone and in this area here it's going to be a little hard for me to wrap tape around I certainly couldn't use a clamp in there but what I can do is I can take a pin and push it through the foam like that and that fin the pin has such a tiny diameter that even though it's going to get exposed to the glue in here and maybe a little glue will stick on it it will still just pull out very easily once once it's all set so in terms of holding things in place painters tape is an awesome Choice don't use other kinds don't use duct tape or anything like that it will stick way too hard use painters tape you can get it at any hardware store you can use little tiny clamps like these very gently in specific situations and pins they will help you a lot so using those three four or five whatever using all of these things you should be able to find how you can use them in different places to you know do the repairs that you need to be able to do so just as another example to not today you can see I've already done a bunch of the repairs here what I'm going to be doing next is removing the tape on here and checking that those repairs that I did yesterday are in fact good and they actually look to be very very good you come in here I'll try to zoom in on that a little bit that area was in here is the bottom half of the fuselage and the top half of the fuselage that was split completely in half and now you can't see that there's any problem there whatsoever and here I'll pull off this is clear you can see how this tape really doesn't stick this is hard to do with one hand there we are stick very hard pulls off here mostly ah it's too hard for me to do with one hand here we are there we go you can see just pulls off there's no residue of the tape left on there whatsoever there we go and as we zoom out here just a little bit you can see there no damage or at least it doesn't really look so bad that was cut right in half we spin around through here it was split all the way through this was completely cracked in half you could separate the whole part completely and it's completely solid now back together like it was uh almost never damaged not quite so that's the general process um and it's a bit of a trick for me to try to actually film me doing all of the actual gluing and steps like that but I hope this gives you a pretty clear idea of what you can do and how to do it and should you ever need to which I hope you never do this will help you out with the putting back together a model that you uh accidentally broke anyways thanks very much for watching I I do hope that this helps and uh I appreciate the comments and feedback that you guys all give so until next time take care and have fun flying

Channel: BlueSkyFPV

Views: 458

Keywords: ARWing Pro, ARWing, ar wing pro, ar wing pro build, repair foam model, fpv, long range fpv, model repair, e6000, repair flying wing, how to fix a model plane, foam airplane, foam model plane

Id: HHd_x9u5dOE

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023