I was lucky enough to be given a Carl Goldberg Anniversary Edition Piper Cub from a guy in the local club. It hasn't been flown in several years, has some minor damage in a few places, and generally needs a lot of work to get it looking nice again. I've decided to recover it in olive drab green. Not having much experience with covering, my question is: Is it better to remove the ailerons, rudder, and elevator to do this, or can I do an adequate job of covering the airplane without removing these parts?


TIA,

Mike D.

if u want the plane to be the same color, so u don't need to remowe them, but if u want other theme, u need toremove everything, cause every edge and corner, and places between hinges must be recowerd withother colour.

GL to you

Dapalong, Welcome to RC Groups!

It's just about like painting a car a different color. If you don't paint the door jambs the new color you'll noticably see the difference. I'd recommend removal of those parts.

Covering can be done with the surfaces still attached, it just takes a little more time. Also if the hinges are pinned it may be very hard to remove them without damaging anything. So it can be done.

Yes, you can cover without removing the moving bits, but that makes it a little more difficult to get the old covering off, as well as putting the new one on, as the others have said. It also leaves edges which can come loose more easily because you aren't able to wrap them around to overlap.

But if you decide to go that route, after you've finished re-covering you can go over the exposed edges, and any bits of the old covering that are still showing through in the cracks, with olive drab paint using a small brush. That'll tidy it up, and help seal the edges of the covering.

You can also cover the in-between spots with small pieces before covering the rest. This way all spots will be covered.

You can slice through the hinges to remove the control surfaces and then re-hinge in a different spot right next to the old hinges.

I would (and did) recover a J-3 which was cub yellow without removing hinges. And did use touch-up olive drab paint for the problem areas. As for the loose edges that wouldn't adhere I went over edges with a bit of CA. The extra time spent covering will be well worth the extra effort. Oh and by the way it's not a J-3 anymore but with invasion stripes it's an L-4 Grasshopper

Nice job, Maineiac!

Thanks ivanc. Dapalong here is a picture of a Grasshopper from WW2 setting on my runways here on my farm today and although it's been converted back to a PA18 it still has the window setup for the L-4, so if you are building a true to scale L-4 you need to work with the fuse to install the extended windows. You can look up Grasshopper on your search engine to get some ideas what they did with these little cubs as Grasshoppers along with pictures. This is a VERY rare bird I hope you understand and you will have something that not many others have but will be a showstopper for you. I wish you every success with your Grasshopper - we sure like ours!!

A few more pictures of an L-4 Grasshopper. The first two pictures with the numbers were the plane ( not mine ) that I used to make my plane into a Grasshopper. The next three pics are of my Grasshopper (without the numbers). I have the OS Gemini 160 twin in mine and aint she sweet!!!