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Chipmunk Rebuild


alant

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The history on the Chipmunk is built 1952 RAF until early 70s then RN at Yeovilton until 1993It was sold by the MOD and has never flown as a civilian registered aircraft. The history on the grease monkey is much more complicated, she is of Dutch origin and has lived in the UK for nearly twenty years (should have been sent back years ago) and has two daughters that go to the same school as my daughter and is one of those annoying people that you show them how to do something once and they can do it better than you. I have the full history of the chipmunk and will dig it out sometime. I am at the workshop tomorrow and will take more photos. They are the poor mans spitfire and great fun to fly, I have about 500 hours on them. What we do is much better than working for a living.

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A few more photos taken while inspecting the airframe and counting the boxes of new and used parts. No 1 is obvious. 2 is under the front instrument panel looking forwards. 3 fuselage centre section tie bars, these hold the wings on. 4 port wing and big box with engine ready to go for rebuild. 5 rear fuselage looking from tail forwards. 6 rear cockpit flap lever, lots of cleaning to do. The airframe appears to be in very good condition with only a few little dents and cracks which is not bad for 41 years of military use and 17 years storage.

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Your customer is going to be well pleased. I'll be following this thread with interesst, as I've got 40-plus Chippy hours and some happy memories from the best part of my pilot's course at Middle Wallop. For fans of the aircraft, there's a thread running over at http://www.pprune.org/aviation-history-nostalgia/385363-chipmunk-beautiful.html with some cracking photos.

Edited by Yorkie370
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Another day of rivet counting and cleaning. So far we have only found two cracks in the fuselage skin under each end of the bottom tie bar and this is a known problem and a repair scheme is in the Maintenance & Repair Manual. The engine has gone to be rebuilt at CFS near Coventry so we now have more working space so I will start a more detailed inspection of the wings tomorrow. Time to do more paperwork now as the aircraft is not fit for flight until the weight of the paperwork exceeds the unladen weight of the aircraft.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Another week of cleaning and inspecting all real exciting stuff but if you miss anything! We are getting x-rays done on the wing undercarraige castings next week to look for cracks another £1000 +. All i have found in the fuselage was a crack in a stiffener under the floor of the front cockpit and have repaired this by following the Maintenance & Repair Manual and a lot of swearing ( not much space and I am not small ). And a couple of photos to show we take H&S very seriously.

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  • 1 month later...

Lots of cleaning and paint stripping has been done over the last month (this is boring). The fabric has been removed from the wings and control surfaces and we are now cleaning and inspecting these and so far have not found anything too bad. I have moved the wings to my workshop at home and have the new fabric on order so hope to start the legal solvent abuse soon. Anyone who is interested is welcome to come and have a look at how things are progressing just pm me first.

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  • 1 month later...

The Port wing is now covered in fabric and will be ready for painting later this week. Fabric work is very labour intensive (expensive) and involves the use of some very nasty solvents. I hope to have this wing finished before we start work on the owners other Chipmunk that needs an annual check and an engine change then yet another Chipmunk annual and two Piper Cubs to finish one waiting for new magnetos the other a rebuilt carb.

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  • 1 month later...

 

We finished the Annual inspection on Saturday 12th Feb and the Chipmunk is back home at Oxford. As the Chipmunk has been around for 60+ years there are a few mandatory inspections that have to be done some take a few minutes others half the day. For anyone interested the registration is G-BXDI. Now back to work on the rebuild of WK635 aka G-HFRH work that one out no prizes though.

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