Slight word of warning from my glider repair experience - Most boats
and autos use polyester resin and not epoxy. Make sure you use the
same as the pants. Polyester on epoxy will not stick properly and
will eventually pop off. What you find in the auto/boat store called
fiberglass resin is usually polyester because it's much cheaper. If
you don't do it yourself, find someone who is familiar with aircraft
composits. The auto guy doing Corvettes won't get it and don't do a
metal repair to the glass.

I'm an old A&P who finds epoxy much easier to work with than metal,
especially for compound shapes. The skills are much easier to learn
if you are starting from scratch. If you do the repair yourself, the
rules are -

Use the same glass cloth
Use the same number of layers in the same direction
Use the same epoxy
Use bondo (also polyester) to fill pin holes only. I use epoxy with
cotton flox or microbaloons for filler.

As the pants aren't structural, you can probably bend these rules a
bit such as type and weave of cloth, but stay away from polyester. My
approach would be to "make the holes disappear" by grinding a wide
scarf joint then re-drilling the holes after the glass work. Mount
them with large washers to spread the load and you have a long-lasting
repair. Total glass work minus curing time and painting shouldn't be
more than a few hours for a skilled repairman.


On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 10:03:18 -0500, "Montblack"
wrote:

("Marc J. Zeitlin" wrote)
Assuming that it IS OK for an owner to work on wheelpants themselves (as
it seems to be) then if I were you, I'd find a local composite aircraft
builder and offer to pay them to fix the pants. I bought prefabricated
wheel pants for my COZY MKIV for $250, and the repair you've described
would take me about 2-3 hours, max. Hell, if I lived anywhere near you,
I'd do it for nothing, just to see how the "certificated" wheel pants
were constructed.

$2500..... That's unbelievable..... Crap, even $1K is unbelievable.
If this guy things (at $60/hr) that it's going to take him 15 hours to
fix the pants, then he hasn't got a clue about composites.

--
Marc J. Zeitlin
http://marc.zeitlin.home.comcast.net/
http://www.cozybuilders.org/


UPS? (Insured!!)

Oh. Plus painting?


Montblack g