A long term recovery of an old .60 size 
nitro powered AirWolf

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This Project is also rather to different to many others I get involved in, because when this helicopter arrived it was in pretty terrible condition, being at least 10 or more years old.

It arrived as a rather sad looking, although quite pretty "semi" AirWolf fibreglass fuselage that needs lot of TLC to bring it back to decent condition, plus two separate sets of mechanics (frames), neither of which are even close to being complete. There are no servos, and the motor nestling inside one set of the mechanics is a rather old .60 BSD motor in unknown condition

After a check around to find out just what we actually had, I discovered that the fuselage "appears" to be an early Graupner Bell 222 that has been drastically modified to make it look more like an AirWolf.  The basic fuselage structure is just fine, but there are several areas that require some strengthening and a lot of work needs to be done on it cosmetically to even get it close to being ready for painting.

The mechanics turned out to be old X-Cell 60 size, which in their day were very good, but sadly today, parts are almost impossible to obtain, so I had to advise it's owner that he was looking at fitting new mechanics when we were ready to move on to that level of the reconstruction.

The current thoughts are either to go with Trex 600 nitro, or possibly the Audacity Pantera mechanics. 

As you can see from the first picture (above) of this helicopter, the paintwork is non existent, as indeed is most of the tail area, so I will have to make a new tail cone out of fibreglass for it, plus repairing this part of the boom area so that the tail gearbox can be mounted strongly. 

You can also see that the area around the horizontal stabilizer needs some work to rectify almost paper thin fibreglass in this area.

I have started work on the fuselage, and here are a few pictures of it after about 3 weeks work.

As can be seen, the fuselage is starting to look a lot better now.  The inside will still need some tidying up as well.  All the seams have been scraped away with a screwdriver and then totally reworked with a thin skim of fine fibreglass filler to get the correct basic shape back.  Once I was reasonably satisfied with that, I started with the super fine stopper paste to catch any small pin holes and tiny scratches that were all over it.  In fact, I ended up almost skimming the entire surface to get it reasonably smooth. This was pretty essential as the AirWolf uses a Metallic Black paint, and black shows up every tiny imperfection really quickly.

Hopefully, that surfacing work has caught it all, and I should soon be able to give it the first coat of colour paint to prove whether it is right or not. The modern metallic paints I have used does not dry to a shiny finish, so once it is all done, the aircraft will be finished with 2 or 3 coats of special UV  protective lacquer to get the finish we want.

Once the basic colour coats are on and have dried thoroughly, I will be needing to fit the retracts as the first real task.  The mountings for the servos were already installed, so I am hoping I can use these "as is".  I can foresee an issue however as I believe I am correct in saying that at the time this fuselage was first available, there really were no decent specialised retract servos, so all three sets of the wheels are going to have to be driven by their own independent programmable digital servos.  Almost certainly I will need to add a speed control module to the retracts system somewhere to get them operating at something like scale speed.

That will mean doing my best to synchronize all three servos to operate at exactly the same time, and at the same speed as well - no mean task as I already know only too well.

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