Sometimes it pays to be a pesimist..

When i put together my Brodak Profile Cardinal, i decided to strengthen it a bit more than the plans described, as it has been many years since my latest flight.
First i put on fibreglass on the whole fuselage, added one layer of silkspan and finally covered it with Oracover (like the rest of the model).On the wing i put on a 4 mm carbon fibre rod all along the trailing edge. I also strengthened the center of the wing with 4 shorter carbon fibre rods. Still came out nicely on weight, and the OS .46 LA just pulls it through trought the manouvers without problems.
Today i was out flying. In the bottom of an inverted loop, the engine stopped.
Lost control and it came inwards and nose dived verically into the ground. It has been rainig lately so it was not hard. Buried about 10 centimeter.
Apart from a foldable wooden Topflite prop, the plane was without a scratch and flying again after 5 minutes.
Norvald Olsvold

Looks like a case of "Spare the rod, Spoil the landing". In your case not sparing the rod saved your bacon! Good call...

Well done, Norvald!

That carbon rod along the trailing edge soudns like a neat, light way to make your wing foldproof.

BUT, if forgive me you will, stoping the bottom of a loop was a very considerate gesture of your engine. You were downwind, your line tension was - if your Cardinal was in a just decent enough trim - good, and all you had to do was let it glide untill it was some 10" from the ground and just flare it. Most probably not even the rudder would get hurt.

I am forced to assume that you:

a) panicked and let it go nose down. If that was the case iI would - if I were you - dedicate some flying sessions to get more confident at inverted flight.

OR

b) you started the loop up high and dived. Don't do that before you master the "normal" ouside loops. It's almost guaranteed to bust your ship, if something goes wrong.You'll only need to "dive and do an ouside loop" when you do the second loop on the clover.

ALSO

c) Are you doing 5' bottoms?

Don't!

Use 10 or 15' bottoms untill you got the maneuver dwon, and only then start lowering your bottoms (I mean, the maneuvers )

No i did not panic.
What i did was to try finishing the loop. Guess i just gave a little too much rudder so it lost speed , and when it came horizontal at 45 degrees up there was not enough lift left in the wing.
In hindsight, a controlled inverted landing would have been the best.

I landed my Pathfinder at the bottom of an inverted loop, but at with full power! I must of clipped the prop as both prop blades broke off of the hub. The plane glided smoothly to a stop on the grass.

Everything was still intact, except that one of the prop blades went though the window portion of the fuse. Of course it was socker field grass, so no big twigs or sticks were around to stick through the wing.

I had reinforced my fuse with 0.5 oz glass cloth as well. Although i put it on with dope instead of epoxy. I may stick with epoxy next time, as I don't think that tail came out as stiff.

My son was kind of enough to mount the window portion of the fuse that I cut out and the prop hub on a sheet of paper and post it on the refrigerator so that everyone could see what I had done!

Jim A.