The only "fix" for a wing attach fitting corrosion issue is to completely disassemble and remove the metal parts, ensure that the composite spar is sound and wasn't damaged in the process of the original metal fitting installation, and then fabricate new fittings, protect them with alodining and appropriate coatings and then re-install everything with wet hardware. If you don't know what ALL of that means and how to do it, you're not in any position to do the work.

As I've stated numerous times before, I believe that it all could be done in about 40 - 80 hours of work, assuming that the underlying composite spar is in good shape.

As you surmise, there are many things that could bite you - the composite spar could be damaged, you might damage something in the removal of the corroded metal, or you might have trouble getting all the re-fabricated pieces to align and fit together correctly upon re-assembly. Paying someone $4k - $8k to do this work, with no guarantee of success, seems like a risky path to me.

VE's change hands fairly regularly, and they don't fall out of the sky regularly, but there HAVE been at least 4 known instances, in around 2K Variezes, of corroded wing attach fittings. Who knows how many are corroded and haven't been discovered? Nobody. I most certainly would never buy one that had any visible corrosion anywhere on the wing attach fittings.

See the picture below for a corroded fitting example - the visible portion, near the hand, is fairly decent looking - you wouldn't necessarily expect that the non-visible portion has severe interlaminar corrosion that has removed over 1/3 of the thickness of the material and damaged the rest.

Saw this oil cooler door idea (pic 1) on a FB page but I don't like it.  The chap has an ingenious linkage to open and close the slots in flight but the problem is that when full open, half the cooler is blocked by the apparatus and even when open, the slots create drag on the air flow.  In hot weather, you will want the whole cooler working.

I have a pic of a cooler using louvers by Marc Z. that is a better idea but it might be copyrighted so you will have to imagine it.  :-)

I did not give this enough thought when building the Cozy.  Eventually I arrived at this slider (pics 2,3) which is satisfactory but  not in-flight adjustable.    With experience, I know about where to set it.  This time of year (Nov), it covers about 2/3rds of the cooler.   In the winter it will block the entire cooler.   Doing it again, I would offset the cooler which might have given the space for a cable-operated slider.

Below is a sample of a panel I laid out using XPanel software. Jim Evans was asking about instrument panel software on the Yahoo groups forum and you can no longer post attachments so here it is ....

 

I am looking for a set of Infinity retract landing gear for sale. New or used.

 

Thanks 

Richard

There's a long history with ongoing discussion about new and coming (and gone) canard aircraft that have been in the works over the years. This thread makes for some interested reading and lessons to be learned.