New(ish) Member
Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:39 pm
Hi Everyone!
I have been hanging around on the FB group for what seems like near a decade and I have been the caretaker of "Pietenpol Girl" NX899DP (a 2008 build) since 2016. She was originally model A powered but was cracked up on her first flight after an engine failure. She was put back together by another local pilot, fitted with an A65 continental and the 40hrs flown off in 2013 after which the engine was removed for a cub and she sat in the back of a hangar for 3 years. I acquired the airframe in the fall of 2016 and mounted another A65 and flew her home. At first she was not enjoyable at all to fly, the controls were sloppy and she was badly out of rig, to the point that she ran out of rudder on her first paved runway takeoff and I had to haul her into the air at just above stall to keep from taking out the runway lights (found out later gear tracking was way off). I put something like 4hrs on her that winter before a bit of a crosswind combined with the poor gear tracking and a shoddy repair from the builders accident contributed to a 2nd landing incident. As I got into the process of disassembling the broken bits I discovered a slew of double drilled bolt holes in the longerons and wing attach fittings on the fuselage (the rear horizontal bolt on the FWD LH strut to fuselage bracket wasn't even through anything other than the fuselage sheeting and interior ply gusset). other issues were a complete lack of edge margin on the vertical bolts in the fuselage carry throughs (one had even broken out) and a lack of edge margin on the engine mount to longeron bolts (noticing a theme here).
It was a frustrating 4 years of disassembling, inspecting, and rebuilding to fix the damage from the gear collapse as well as correct all the errors made by the builder and shoddy repairs by the first rebuilder but in March 2022 I finally returned her to the sky. So far in 2022 I have managed to put 19hrs on her in between kansas wind storms and finally have all the rigging and trim issues resolved! I can report that she now flys exactly as Pietenpol should! With a little bit of luck and good weather I may even attend the Brodhead gathering this year, Its just a bit over a hop, skip, and jump from Udall, KS though!
I have been hanging around on the FB group for what seems like near a decade and I have been the caretaker of "Pietenpol Girl" NX899DP (a 2008 build) since 2016. She was originally model A powered but was cracked up on her first flight after an engine failure. She was put back together by another local pilot, fitted with an A65 continental and the 40hrs flown off in 2013 after which the engine was removed for a cub and she sat in the back of a hangar for 3 years. I acquired the airframe in the fall of 2016 and mounted another A65 and flew her home. At first she was not enjoyable at all to fly, the controls were sloppy and she was badly out of rig, to the point that she ran out of rudder on her first paved runway takeoff and I had to haul her into the air at just above stall to keep from taking out the runway lights (found out later gear tracking was way off). I put something like 4hrs on her that winter before a bit of a crosswind combined with the poor gear tracking and a shoddy repair from the builders accident contributed to a 2nd landing incident. As I got into the process of disassembling the broken bits I discovered a slew of double drilled bolt holes in the longerons and wing attach fittings on the fuselage (the rear horizontal bolt on the FWD LH strut to fuselage bracket wasn't even through anything other than the fuselage sheeting and interior ply gusset). other issues were a complete lack of edge margin on the vertical bolts in the fuselage carry throughs (one had even broken out) and a lack of edge margin on the engine mount to longeron bolts (noticing a theme here).
It was a frustrating 4 years of disassembling, inspecting, and rebuilding to fix the damage from the gear collapse as well as correct all the errors made by the builder and shoddy repairs by the first rebuilder but in March 2022 I finally returned her to the sky. So far in 2022 I have managed to put 19hrs on her in between kansas wind storms and finally have all the rigging and trim issues resolved! I can report that she now flys exactly as Pietenpol should! With a little bit of luck and good weather I may even attend the Brodhead gathering this year, Its just a bit over a hop, skip, and jump from Udall, KS though!