Lesson Learned -- Removing Plastic

[Jerry Folkerts]

I'm posting this because it took me a while to learn this, despite asking people how they did it. At first, I tried removing plastic with my hands -- not good for your thumbs. I knew there had to be a better way. On the VANS forum, I read about using PVC tubes to roll it up, using your palms. My first experiments tried to removing plastic from large sections with longer and thicker tubes -- it works ok on wing skins etc, but on preformed skins such as the aileron I'm working on, it doesn't work that well. My friend Charlie Eubanks suggested I break it into smaller pieces with my soldering iron. On the flaps and ailerons, I used my soldering iron to carve the plastic into rib width pieces by section, top front, bottom, top back. I then used my small piece of PVC to quickly remove the plastic from the skin. This aileron skin took a little over 30 minutes, start to finish, and my fingers did not hurt at the end. The photos show how I start it on an angle to get the edge going, then straighten out the PVC to quickly roll up the plastic. I added one to show how I support the aileron skin while doing this. You need to be careful with the .016 skins.