paint sticks in fuselage ?

[egp8111]

I'm looking at a 6 as a project. It is flying but definitely needs love.
The fuselage has a couple paint stir sticks fiberglassed to the sides in the rear of the fuse between the bulkheads. I'm guessing this was an effort to eliminate oil canning? Has anyone heard of this before ? My RV4 never had any oil canning issues at all.

Thanks
Skip

[StephenC]

The 6 that I bought had patches of rubberised floor insulation glued in the middle of the fuselage panels. I don’t know how effective it was at stopping oil canning. I bought the aircraft without a trial flight so was not aware of the horrendous vibration the aircraft had. I suspect the builder put the patches there to try to control the vibration. The vibration turned out to be coming from the aluminium engine baffles slowly cutting their way through the engine cowl. All fixed now and vibrations gone.

[Scott Hersha]

George Orndorf used to recommend in his videos, to glue that rubberized floor insulation to the spaces between bulkheads aft of the bag bin in the RV6/7 to deaden noise, and maybe oil canning, when taxiing your taildragger over seams in the taxi way, or any bumps. I never tried it, but I assumed it worked.

[abwaldal@gmail.com]

Well Skip, the price better be in line with the cost of the paint sticks. aluminum angle isn't that expensive.
This one is a real knee slapper, Better look it over real good before the purchase.
I have never seen this one before.
Art

[Snowflake]

Originally Posted by egp8111

I'm looking at a 6 as a project. It is flying but definitely needs love.
The fuselage has a couple paint stir sticks fiberglassed to the sides in the rear of the fuse between the bulkheads. I'm guessing this was an effort to eliminate oil canning? Has anyone heard of this before ? My RV4 never had any oil canning issues at all.

I haven't heard of this solution before, but it's possible that he's had one too many hard landings on the tailwheel and the tailcone has started to deform the and lead to oil-canning of the aft fuselage sides in the bays near the tail spring. If so, maybe glassing the paint sticks in there was an attempt to flatten out the oilcanning so it wasn't visible to a purchaser? Or maybe just an attempt to reinforce?

[Ralph Inkster]

Using paint sticks seems to be a pretty novel approach, as long as it doesn't collect or trap moisture, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Oil canning in the bay behind the luggage bulkhead is pretty common, there have been prior threads on this subject on VAF.

I have added stiffener 'J strips' in a number of 6/7/9/8 fuselages to fix this issue. In some planes, I fabricated ribs instead of stiffeners, to anchor very solid ELT mounts.

[egp8111]

Ah the wisdom of group knowledge ! There is damage history and repair done to the aft fuselage.(along with a new et of gear legs and an engine tear down!)
It's currently flying but I'm looking at it as a project. Yep the price is going to have to reflect the history.
Thanks all for your thoughts
Skip

[rvsxer]

I had slight oil canning in a couple of bays in my RV-6's aft fuselage when the airplane was finished. I took short pieces of .025 bent angle and stuck one vertically in each bay. To attach them I used 3M VHB tape bare metal to bare metal. I then used a fluting pliers and fluted them slightly to perfectly conform to the fuselage side contour. It's been 22 years and 1,900 hours and no problems.

[Ralph Inkster]

Originally Posted by egp8111

Ah the wisdom of group knowledge ! There is damage history and repair done to the aft fuselage.(along with a new et of gear legs and an engine tear down!) …

Thanks all for your thoughts
Skip

Oh, now more of the story comes out…
My comments refer to augmenting good structure, not alternate methods for damage repairs!