"G.R. Patterson III" wrote in message ...
Dan Thomas wrote:

Can make an
airplane nearly worthless if there are cracks in those spars, ....

Hell, the data plate alone is worth about 5 grand. If the spars are bad, it just
needs new wings.

George Patterson
This marriage is off to a shaky start. The groom just asked the band to
play "Your cheatin' heart", and the bride just requested "Don't come home
a'drinkin' with lovin' on your mind".


Folks recently have been having trouble getting spar-grade
spruce at anything near decent prices, and the new metal wings are
something like $15K. There have been some good deals on older Champs
here in Canada, when the spars have been found cracked. And the guys
who are doing the inspection the best way possible, by taking off the
fabric and having a close look under the ribs and strut and spar butt
fittings and next to the plywood doublers, are reporting hairline and
compression cracks all over the place. Some have found BIG cracks that
have been present since somebody groundlooped the airplane years
before or the wind blew it over on its back, and even these cracks
went unnoticed until the fabric came off. So much for decent
annuals...
A Taylorcraft crashed near here a few years ago when the aft spar
in one wing failed. There was an old crack extending diagonally inward
and down through the strut attach point that appeared to have occurred
when the airplane was blown over in a windstorm several years before,
and nobody went looking for such damage. I once owned an Auster
(British Taylorcraft, on steroids) that had an identical crack through
an aft spar that had been put there, probably, when the wind took it
away from its tiedowns and banged it into a hangar, before I owned it.
Nobody saw that one, either, until I took the fabric off the wings to
recover them. Five of the eight drag wires were busted, too, so the
fabric was all that was holding the wing square.
And I had been flying that airplane. That's why I get paranoid
about wooden spars and the difficulty of inspecting them properly.

Dan