Page 6 - August2020

Then it was time for the Italian scrapers and jewelry Moving to the outside, it was my hope to remove the
tools to remove large areas of paint. fabric skin in one piece. Boy was I out to lunch. What
appeared to be straightforward turned out to be the
Achilles heel of this part. The outside areas came off well
but the buck stops there.

Colette worked tools under the fabric but it too was like
glass, with brittle dope chips flying in all directions. We
found that reinforcing tapes came off easy. Some areas
of the fabric could be worked off by sliding tools under
the skin, but the feel and sound were similar to getting
into the wood itself.

Some of the tools of the trade; fine picks and scrapers and
a few Dremel rotary tools. Removing the fittings, peeling
the fabric and scraping the layers of paint and dope from
just one panel is a +50 hour process.
I would like to throw a plug in for a little company in
Calgary I use extensively for supplies called "Ken's
Gems". Ken provides supplies for the stone and
jewelry makers, I could get lost in his little shop for
days. I have been using jewelry tools pretty much
from the start. The team now finds itself in there
replacing worn tools.

The inside of the panel provided some interesting
features like carved initials, fasteners imbedded in the
wood and mechanical damage to the wood where
someone used a screwdriver to pry the panel from the
fuselage.

Only the outside surface of the panel is covered with fabric,
but to finish it off, it is wrapped over to the inside by about an
inch. Some of comes away easily; most does not.

I tried ketone solvents both to soften and pull the fabric,
with poor results. I then settled on sanding until the
fabric was exposed. Next I used MEK (methy lethyl
ketone) to soften the dack proofing (the red) and ended
up scraping the surface to basically get a mud pile.

Once the fabric had been removed, we then took the
diamond cutters and silicone wheels to remove the old

glue and debris. That gets us to the point where we can
The inside of the panel is marked with the serial number of pass the panel to our wood repair crew to remove the
our Mosquito: RS700, along with two identification rot and address the debonding and mechanical damage.
patches. We have left these intact and will protect them
with a clear coat rather than stripping them off the panel.