Manhours for recovering a Supercub?

[Nordic Flyer]

A group of us are planning to recover a Supercub. Could anyone advise how many man hours it would take to strip the fabric, prepare the structure, cover, dope and paint. As the wings need doing now but the fuselage could wait a year or two an estimation of hours for each would also be useful. I will add extra hours to cover for problems once the fabric is removed, but a basic estimate would help a group of first timmers in planning our renovation.

Thanks
Peter Curwen

[Bill McCarthy]

If you take a look on "youtube" under "super cub airplane recover" you will see what is in front of you, job wise. There is a whole host of information on covering, rib stitching, doping etc under different titles. Giz it when you've finished !!

[mike newall]

Drop me a PM.

My Bro's group did their PA12 a couple of years ago - he will tell you exactly.

[Terry Lee]

Forgive the drift, but has anyone here recovered an Auster fuselage? Ideally I want to recover the sides and top, fin included, without disturbing the underside which is in good condition. Thoughts anyone?

[Brian Hope]

Re Auster. First thoughts are why would you do that rather than recover the whole fuselage and be done with it but if that's what you want to do then it depends to a large extent on whether the bottom was originally put on as a single skin and then the sides attached to it along their bottom edges. If not then you could find that the bottom comes away when you take some of the other fabric off. Even if it can be left on, you will have to take the surface finish right back to clear doped fabric to get a good glue bond between the old and new fabric. Final painting could be a problem too, depending on what the current finish is. Seems more trouble than it's worth to me.

[gasax]

Re the Supercub - Polyfibre used to give some estimates in the documentation. A quick browse of the SuperCub US site will also yield some info. But if you've not done it before and more than one of you is involved - the answer is ages!

And you will almost certainly be faced with other jobs that will have to be done - so it is a great oppertunity which will take as long as it takes.

Re the Auster - bonding new fabric to fabric which already has a paint finish is a mugs game. Even using great care to strip the old fabric there is a good chance in damaging the remaining fabric's bond with the sub-structure. Additionally the one area you really must inspect is the underside of the tubes where any water will have gathered. From having recovered an Auster, I would say that retaining the bottom fabric would lengthen the job and degrade the value of recovering. Much easier to simply remove it all and re-do it all in one process. Then you can be sure about bonding to the sub-strucutre and between the fabric sections.

[ROB THOMASSON]

As to how long it takes to cover Auster wings, according to my log when I did mine it took me 77 hours. Mine is a short wing so is 1 rib less than the long wing ones. To stitch a rib on my own took 45 minutes and a short one where the aileron is took 35 minutes. I could do 3 ribs and then took a break and maybe 2 more in the afternoon. I have arms like an gorilla so could do the stitching on my own but it is easier with 2 people
Do remember there can be a fair bit of drying time between stages so I found I could do about 3 useful hours per working day. Sometimes more and sometimes less.
The ailerons were already done and are right fiddle so allow for this too.