I think you have a pretty good plan. Your A&P is right, but so what? You'll get 5 good years of flying. Eventually you need to recover it regardless of fabric condition to ensure the bones are sound for acro.
If you get the rejuvenator on before the cracks go through the silver and the dope starts separating from the fabric, it should work well. That is my plan on my wings. On my fuselage, it was too far gone. I wound up stripping the dope to the fabric with a putty knife. See my thread for that adventure.
In terms of things learned relevant to your project, I was not impressed with the bonding power of the nitrate dope used on my 78 Decathlon. You should expect some loose tapes, possibly made worse by the rejuvenator, and have a plan to fix. Make sure you have a quart of Super Seam handy for that.
For stripping, hardware store Lacquer Thinner is functionally the same as Butyrate and Nitrate thinner, at half the cost. Don't use it for thinning rejuvenator and coatings though, just for stripping and cleanup.
Be very thorough in masking your plexiglass. The solvents used in Ceconite will trash it. Consider popping out your rear side windows. It is not hard.
I hate hate hate mixing systems, for exactly this reason. I would strip the polyfiber coatings down to bare dacron and build up with Ceconite.
My wife thought we looked like a traveling circus. There has to be a name for the airplane in that statement somewhere. I am not sure if this will be a rebuild or just a really extensive annual. Last logbook entry was in 2009. I've already ordered rejuvenator so I suppose somewhere in between.
Original fabric and dope as far as I can tell, with exception of a polyfiber patch on the belly. I have started sanding and plan on rejuvenating per the ceconite manual. The wings and tail have a lot of fine cracks but only on the white. In the photo cracks sanding down to the silver seem to completely disappear. The plan is to rejuvenate, add a few coats of silver to the cracked areas and put the color back on. (1)My A&P thinks I will be seeing these cracks again in about 5 years. Any thoughts? (2)Of the excellent threads on rejuvenating is there any thing any of you wish you had done different or knew about up front? (3) On my 20"x20" polyfiber belly patch should I tape it off and leave it out of the rejuvenation or treat it like it was butyrate?
)! Poohy to these pampered pilots that fly their stuff home!
Anyone who follows Trade A Plane will recognize this picture. After about 6 months listed, overnight the pictures and price changed from airplane to project. I purchased it sight unseen, which is a terrible thing to do, but so far I haven't found anything to be unhappy about.
Two days after applying rejuvenator I had some tape lift on my elevators. I think it may have been related to the hot weather, it was already up to 85 by the time I applied the second coat, and that was at 9 AM. I have since started adding retarder, which is not specified in the Ceconite manual but the problem hasn't repeated it self so I am going with it. I used an artist brush to add some nitrate dope under the tape and ironed it down with aluminum fold to keep the dope from sticking to the iron.
