On Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:32:20 AM UTC-7, (unknown) wrote:
I'm looking at a glass ship to possibly buy that is in pretty good condition. The Gel coat was last done in 94 or so and is very white with no crazing. The ship does have some cracks both on the bottom of the horizontal stab near the cutout for the attach post. It also has some near the trailing edge of the upper wing skins and also on the bottom wing skins. The cracks in the upper surfaces are centered in small depressions that almost look a well formed caulk line that was smoothed with a finger.(just a description of the shape not what I think was actually done) I'm guessing that someone in the past possibly tried to sand out some earlier cracking which later reappeared or possibly was filled with a filler that later shrunk. The cracks on the bottom of the wing are much longer cordwise but don't have the depressions like the ones on top.

Here is a link to a picture of the bottom of the tailplane.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/6612622...n/photostream/

Here is a link to a picture of the top of the wing skins.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/6612622...n/photostream/

I know how hard it is to judge this kind of thing from pictures but can any of you that have repaired things like this in the past take a guess as to weather this would be a simple cosmetic repair or does it look like some glass work would be required. I tried tapping adjacent to all the cracks and didn't find any areas that sounded any different than the rest of the wing.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

I refinished my sailplane and sanded all the gel coat off, I hired a man of Mexican decent to do the fuse and he did an excellent job but my white boys could do nothing but complain about doing the wings so I left a little gel coat on in places in hopes of retaining the contour. But in the places I left the gel coat cracks are now starting to show. I will now have to go back and sand back through to the gel coat untill the cracks are gone then body work and paint. Do it right the first time. When sanding off the gel coat you have to be carefull not to go through the glass but if a crack does go into the glass sand the crack out and lay a few plys of glass back over the spot and sand back down. I do not believe that gel coat cracks can cause the structure to fail, it just looks bad.