Where can we get wing-struts for the Kurki?

Suomeksi.

Even though the fitting of the wings to the I.V.L.K.1. Kurki is still months away the issue of the wing-struts has already popped up. Without them, fitting the wings will not happen.

In the late 1940ies the I.V.L.K.1. Kurki, like many other planes de-commissioned in the 1920ies and -30ies ended up being stored in an old war-time hangar at Vesivehmaa airfield. Later this hangar became the Päijänne-Tavastia Aviation Museum. When taking the Kurki for conservation we got the fuselage and the wings but only two out of six wing-struts, that presumable were from the Kurki. Presumably, because we’ll really know if, when we start fitting the wing to the fuselage.

No drawings of the Kurki wing-struts are available, but based on comparison of dimensions of the struts in pictures taken of the plane and those of the available wing-struts, the Tuesday-Club members have concluded that one is the front strut of the right wing and the other the mid strut of the left wing.

When considering the issue of the wing-struts and taking a close look at photographs of the I.V.L. C 24 and I.V.L. C 25 fighters designed and built at the Air Force Aircraft Factory at Suomenlinna we concluded that their wing-strut arrangement was similar to that on the Kurki. This was especially true for that on the I.V.L. C 25. Thus it is possible, that the wing-struts of these planes, that only reached the prototype stage and were taken out of use already in 1925, could well have been used on the Kurki built a couple of years later.

It also came to our minds, that when the I.V.K C 24 was restored “around” the rather damaged fuselage, could it be possible that wing-struts fit for the Kurki had been used in this project? To check this, personnel of the Finnish Air Force Museum took a close look at the disassembled I.V.L. C 24 stored at Tikkakoski, However, its wing-struts turned out to be carved out of “common 2 by 4rs”, so no answer there.

So at the moment we have but two damaged wing-struts that we presume belong to the Kurki. Our next steps will be to repair the damage on the plywood cover parts of the struts and to clean the corroded metal parts and finish of the work by varnishing the repaired plywood surfaces and cleaned metal parts using aluminium-bronze varnish. We will also make drawings to enable us to re-create the missing wing-struts and build them. Inspecting the damaged parts has shown us, that the load-carrying part of the strut is a steel tube of 2” diameter, with a leading edge shaped from solid wood and a trailing part built using wooden wing-ribs and a trailing rib. The whole wing-strut has then been covered using plywood.

We assume, that the wing-struts on both sides are mirror images of each other, but otherwise similar. Thus we can use the two existing struts as reliable models when building their pairs. Building the missing rear struts though, is a bit of a problem, because the only source we have for their design are the photographs taken of the Kurki. We can start designing and making them using the existing struts as basic models, but they can only be finished once the wings of the Kurki have been conserved and the wing has been fitted to the fuselage supported by the front- and centre wing-struts.