Recovering the fuselage

[aidan mcatamney]

Last week I stripped off the old covering of my 13 year old Super Frontier Senior.   It was toughlon material the Chinese used at their factory to cover all of their World Models planes.  The problem is it delaminates and starts coming away from the wood. When I got it all removed it had left a colour stain behind , so I took a bottle of acetone and some kitchen roll and this removed it nicely prior to recovering.   Bearing in mind, this is a very large plane 65 inches long with a wingspan of 80 inches , thankfully the covering on the giant wing is fine.  I then cut out templates for the covering and set my iron at 150 degrees centigrade and got going with the all white Oracover.   After completion my next job was to remove the blue paint that World Models had used to spray the plastic windows on both sides of the fuselage.   I never like this as it made the pilot invisible.   So it was out with the acetone again and with a lot of elbow grease it left the windows nice and clear and the pilot figure can now be seen.  My final job today before installing the cowl and wheels was to add two trim lines down both sides.   In keeping with the original scheme, World Models added three lines, one red , one dark blue and one mid blue.  I decided to just make do with one red and one blue.   The end result was very pleasing.   Also to be different from the original, I'm going to leave the tail plane all white.  Very pleased tonight with the outcome.  Oracover is not cheap but well worth it in the end as the Super Frontier Senior is such a nice big relaxing plane to fly and I want to hold onto it for another few years if I can.