Over the past week I’ve been involved helping my local Canardian buddy, Guy Williams, fix his Long-EZ that was damaged during its annual condition inspection, when the A&P pulled the batteries out of the nose without it being lowered first… Oops!  And yep, up it went on its backside.

The nearly horizontal prop got a ding on one end, which Guy removed, boxed up to send to Joe Person for repair, and replaced with a spare wooden prop.

The lower aft winglets were next on the list of damage, with the right getting off fairly easy while the left took the brunt of the impact: cracking the tubular taillight housing, these being added to the bottom of the lower winglets by original builder Frank Tifft.

Here’s the right lower winglet with some minor cracks, which I filled both internally and externally with micro and flox.

Again, the damage to the left lower winglet was much more extensive and required sanding off the paint to expose all the damage.

Apparently neither Guy nor I got a shot of the left winglet’s damage, but my first task was to get all the cracked “jigsaw puzzle” pieces micro’d/floxed back into place and the original shape reestablished.  I then did a 1-ply UNI wrap layup to secure the reassembled structure to the existing lower winglet.  That did the trick and it was plenty strong with minimal added weight.

Also not shown was the remaking of half the top and the complete bottom taillight standoffs that are located at the upper and lower side of the light bracket at the screw mounting positions.  After creating templates of the right light assembly, I made the new taillight mounting standoffs out of 1/8″ thick G10 phenolic and floxed them into place.

After an overnight cure on mounting standoffs, I slathered up the lower left winglet with micro, and cheese grated it about 3-1/2 hours later.

The following day I sanded down the micro to its final state, and then applied 5 epoxy wipes as per the Corey Bird finishing method.  We then let that cure overnight as well.

After sanding down the epoxy wipes and blending that into the existing winglet paint, I then hit the repaired area with a couple coats of primer.

I then shot the lower left winglet with some color-matched Nasson paint that we picked up at Napa Auto Parts.

The blending is always the hardest part when you’re repairing a smallish area on a much bigger painted surface.  Even though when I shot the paint I kept peeling back the tape to expose more of the original surface, there was a bit of a hard paint line that was distinct between the old and new paint.

I told Guy we could let it cure and see how the paint levels out, or try to blend it more.  He wasn’t too keen on the distinct line between old and new paint, so I very carefully went sanded the junction line, prepped the old and new paint surfaces and reshot the yellow paint to blend it in more.

Here’s the result.  It’s very difficult to see any difference on the inboard side of the winglet.

Admittedly, I am NOT a master painter, and the outboard side of the winglet looks really good, albeit the blending did leave a hair flatter surface towards the front lower side of the winglet that can be seen if you’re looking more critically at the paint.

In the pics above and below the taillights have been successfully reinstalled (note the light brackets were stripped, primed and repainted as well).

As both Guy and I quipped at the end of our repair effort: Good enough for government work.  Time to get this bird back in the air! … and for me to get back to getting my bird in the air.