What happened?

Once I got back home, I couldn't wait to get to the hangar and see if I had those radius plates. It turned out I didn't. My installation was something particular with four bolts per side to attach the gear with big, wide flat plates...

Having now more information on the problem, I made a better inspection of the fuselage structure and found the following:

• The fuselage tubing paint around the gear area on the LH side is starting to peel off and light surface corrosion is starting. The paint on the RH side is all nice and glossy.
• Some welds on the LH side look like shit, seriously. Maybe shit is nicer actually. The RH side equivalents are superb.
• The cracked diagonal on the LH side has a fishmouthed sleeve which indicates it's been repaired. Also, if I looked along the tube axis, I could see it was bent.
• The lower LH longeron seem to have a weld along its axis near the gear location, which is not present on the RH lower longeron.

In light of the above observations, here is my theory of what happened to this aircraft in the past:

• At one point in time, the left longeron was badly damaged due to the torsional loads and the owner did not realize.
• Then something major happened, probably the gear collapsed into the fuse on one side during landing. Hopefully the airplane was not ground-looped. The bottom wings don't look repaired and the fabric is not patched.
• Unfortunately, the owner at that time probably didn't know about the radius plate fix, and simply welded back the pieces together, without fixing the root cause of the problem.
• The repair was done quickly, probably without removing the engine or the systems, explaining the paint marks on the purge valve sleeve.
• The welds being so bad, they created a stress riser in a rough area and it cracked.

Now what? What do I do with all this? One thing for sure is I want to install radius plates so I ordered some to Grove Aircraft. One other thing for sure is I want to remove and replace the cracked member. I am still not fixed today on whether or not I change other members of the forward fuse or if I just install beef-ups like a sleeves or gussets. Anyway, the removal of the cracked member involves the removal of the engine, wings, fuel and systems in order to have the best access to the damaged area and do a proper job. Next post will be on the progress of the removal of engine, wings and systems.