Upon returning to Canadore in the fall of 2022, I’d switched from the AME program to the Aviation Structures Tech program. Building things is much more my interest so this seemed to fit better than what I’d taken in the first year. I was proven correct. On the first day of class we began work on what is arguably my most enjoyable time at the college - recovering a wooden aircraft wing with doped fabric. This project would have been right at home in World War 1 and the Sopwith Camel.

The project involved stripping off the work done by the previous year’s students, performing any repairs, and recovering. Unfortunately this sort of work in the real world is pretty thin on the ground, and so there’s not a lot of emphasis put into it. The fabric we used was a modernized version of the correct type, but the Ekofill we had to use was expired years ago and so went on very poorly. The final finish of our wings wasn’t to the standard I would have liked, but it’s what we had to work with.

Click on the images below for more details.