Fibreglass Wingtips – 50 Years Ago

By sheer coincidence, 50 years ago this month EAA Sport Aviation featured this article on building fibreglass wingtips. (See Hoerner Wingtips Tanks for Sonerai II - Part 3 article in this issue.) This aircraft was a Stits Skycoupe, and the author was one M.B. Standing of Woodside, California. The author felt it was okay in those days to use polyester resin, whereas today epoxy resin would be the choice. He used pieces of cardboard to act as supports for the fibreglass cloth and decided to leave them in place rather than figure out how to remove them.

We hope you enjoy comparing this article from the archive with Bill Evans’ excellent modern and detailed version which we started two months ago. Note the recurring theme with “two types of Styrofoam” in the two articles.

One wonders if that Skycoupe is still flying and whether the owner knows that he has pieces of cardboard shipping material in his wingtips.