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Holes in aluminum mast

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lightandfrost
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Re: Holes in aluminum mast

Postby lightandfrost » Sun Sep 09, 2018 6:06 am

You can restore the mast however it will be slightly shorter and heavier.

Cut the mast below the bend

Fill the mast with epoxy resin and silica powder. You can fill the whole mast or just the first 20 or 30 cm. Suggest you just fill the whole mast as the aluminum strength is already suspect.

Remove the aluminum that is inserted into the base thru drilling etc. Line up and glue the mast into base with epoxy and silica powder. Then drill three spaced holes thru the mast/base and bolt as epoxy does not stick to aluminum well even when the aluminum surface is rough.

The commentary in this thread about fuselage stress being less in the tail area is certainly accurate. Initially our fuselages were constructed by filling our metal rod fuselage with epoxy/silica powder mix only in the higher stress areas. However this works just fine until you bump the bottom with the tail and bend the fuselage. Since then the fuselage metal rods were filled completely with this mix and no further bending of a number of different fuselages has occurred.

Unless you are racing on flat water we doubt any weight reduction is worth the effort.


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