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Cameron's Christen Eagle II Build Thread

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Cameron

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And so the journey begins...... Hopefully, I'll stay motivated to keep this thread updated. We'll see.

This will be a mostly stock Eagle. I will make a few improvements here and there, but its a pretty solid airframe from what I can tell. I flew one back in the fall and I liked it alot. Nice and comfortable, and performed very well. Should be a good compromise between a cross country and acro airplane. I also flew an RV and I liked it alot, but it was missing a wing. Plus, I just liked the way the Eagle flew alot better than the RV. Then this kit showed up on the forum and here we are.

This kit is from 1979. I think it has changed hands a few times. Surprisingly, most of the components are still in their original packaging from Christen Industries. Surprisingly, when I went to inventory all the parts, they were all there. I had to hunt through boxes to find everything, but its all there.


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So today, I got the left wing on saw horses and started looking at it a little closer. Many of the ribs are loose on the spars so I want to be able to slide them over to clean and reglue them. Because of this and that I wanted to install wider filler strips to attach the wood leading edge to, I removed all of the filler strips between the ribs.

I also found a rough spot on the top of the rear spar. I don't know if this is a big deal or not, but it did concern me. Anybody care to comment?

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I also want to reinforce the wing walk so I removed the bottom panel.

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The tip rib is a little beat up and loose, so I'm just going to replace it all together. I hate to have repaired ribs in a new airplane. Plus, the tip bow wasn't attached real well. I stopped here on the Left wing. I'm still debating on what to do about the rear drag/anti drag blocks. Part of me wants to take the easy way out and fill the compression ribs with epoxy. But, another part of me wants to replace the two piece blocks with one piece units. I haven't figured out a clean way of doing that yet though.

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One good thing about tearing all this stuff apart has been that it has given me alot of confidence in the Weldwood glue joints that are already there. Except for the rib to spar joints, none of the glue joints simply separated. I had to chisel away the wood that I was removing, then sand and scrape the wood remnants and glue.

Tomorrow, the right wing will get a similar treatment, except for the tip rib and the wing walk. But, the right wing has some other issues that the left does not. 30 years of moving and storage has taken its toll. The previous owner tried to repair one rib. Its kind of sloppy and it isn't scarfed like it says to in AC4313. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this yet, but something has to be done. I'd like to replace the whole rib, but I haven't figured out how to do that since it has a partial rib and plywood attached to the trailing edge. I may have to replace all of it. There's another rib that is missing the whole trailing edge. I think I can build a new rib right on the wing with a rib jig that has been notched for the spars. Should be interesting.

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