Glider Wraps, Gelcoat Refinishing

Wrapping an aircraft isn't new.

Back in 1983, I saw several F-104 Starfighters in white shrink-wrap material. They were to be shipped from Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, to Taiwan. The F-104's were at Luke for training German pilots. However, in the early 80's, the Luftwaffe was changing over to Tornado's and the training program, run not by the U.S. Air Force, but by Lockheed came to an end.

Herbert, how's your project coming? If you want to increase the scope of the project, just shrink wrap the Cobra with LS8 inside and ship to me. I'll continue the test and you can go and get yourself a self-launcher that you've would like to have!

Ray

No need to run the experiment. Just look under contest numbers on gliders and trailers. If I had a new glider with gel coat I would really look at wrapping the whole glider. I did the numbers a few years ago and total weight was only about 30 pounds or less for the wrap.

An example:



http://blog.aopa.org/lgfsweeps/?p=110

On Friday, September 14, 2012 2:35:29 PM UTC-4, Tim Taylor wrote:
An example:
http://blog.aopa.org/lgfsweeps/?p=110

Darn, I was hoping for an example wrapped pilot.

On Friday, September 14, 2012 11:35:29 AM UTC-7, Tim Taylor wrote:
An example:







http://blog.aopa.org/lgfsweeps/?p=110

Looks like he's got three years on it now. Might be worth contacting him to see how it worked long term.

Craig

I would call Dick Butler he can tell you about that. Dick Butler's Concordia has - from the reports I've read - some control surfaces wrapped in Monocote, a shrink film used for model airplanes. This was done solely for mass reduction

I could see Monocote(high heat film) and Oracover(low heat activated film) being used in this capacity but it depends on what is underlaying. Generally RC films work well and easily with balsa and obeechi sheeting. They can be applied on raw, clean (parting wax removed completely) fiberglass but that's not as easy and really hard if the surface is a curved or of complex shape. And films often have to be tempered meaning the first few times in the sunlight they can bubble/relax and sag from heat and have to be reheated/re-shrunk. The car wrap technology sounds interesting and appears to work well on complex surfaces. It would be interesting to see how it is done.