Ricksochet Rebuild (the 's' is silent)

I've rebuilt a model airplane. It's a Phoenix Dolphin .40 ARF. It was a fun challenge and I'm impressed with my first real attempt at rebuilding a plane. Following is information and pictures of the process.

As a background - a friend of mine had this plane. He is still learning to fly and just after take-off on his second flight with this plane, it caught a wing, cartwheeled and snapped the fuselage in half right behind the pilot. He decided the hobby was too expensive and gave me his plane, engine, radio, and other parts and pieces.

First, I pulled back the covering and tried to keep it in decent shape. I didn't want to have to do a massive re-covering job.



Then it was a process to line up the plane from front to back. Fortunately, there are 4 main spars that run the length of the plane. 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom. One of the top spars had simply broke so it was fairly easy to know where that connection was to be made. On the other side, shown in the picture below, I had the missing piece so I could easily get that spar to line up correctly as well.



So this gave me the correct connections for the top side of the plane, but I didnt have the parts for the bottom two spars. So I had to guess at the angle of connection. I didn't think much of it the first time, focusing more on the alignment from left to right:



I then began the bracing using balsa and CA glue to hold it in place.



Then came the bigger pieces and the 7 minute epoxy and sanding.



-- At this point, I realized I had the angle wrong. The tail was too low, so I had to cut the lower brackets, lift the tail, rebrace, reglue and resand. I had already put some TrimCoat on the upper section so I was fortunate to be able to lift and lower the tail without the fear of the left-to-right angle going crazy on me.

After that - I still wasn't comfortable with the elevation of the tail, so I talked to a hobby shop. They weren't too much help, but they thought the tail was too high. So, I cut it again and lowered the tail some.

Finally, after checking and double checking - I decided I had it close enough and began the coating process. I had purchased black, white and blue trimcoat and started with the black on the bottom, the whites on the sides. I pulled the existing blue coating back over the top, behind the pilot. With a couple of pieces of the blue and black, I have the end result:



You can see that some of the trims pieces were just a little bit off, but overall I think it turned out well.



And after adding the internal stuff, radio, engine, landing gear, etc.... The plane is ready to go.





If I hadn't glued it wrong the first two times, I probably only put about 8 hours of work into this. It was kindof a fun project, I learned some great lessons and look forward to taking this thing into the air soon.