Time: 6 Hours
After I finished up the last little bit of the windscreen fairing and finished admiring my work I set out to do some fiberglass work. First was to add two layers of fiberglass tape to the rivet lines on the gear leg fairings. I covered the tape with ply peel and will get to sanding these after cure.
Next up was to check on a task I did last night and that was a flox/epoxy spacer I made to get a good fit between the wheel pant and the bracket that it gets attached to. The idea is that the screws that attach the pants to the brackets will deform the pants if the mating of the bracket/pant isn’t perfect. That would look bad after the pants are painted. So I carefully filled the space between the bracket and pant with epoxy/flox to make them fit perfect.
I sanded the flox all around and cleaned up the edges. This is gonna work perfect so I did the upper holes of this bracket and the lower holes of the other side.
Next up was removing the primer on the canopy skirts and add two layers of fiberglass over the rivet holes. I’m doing this as I have found that my filler that I put over the rivets was starting to crack under the flexing during opening and closing the canopy. This took several hours to get accomplished and I still have the vertical rows to do.
I only saw cracking on the lower few rivets towards the forward edge but I though I better do all of them as that would have been the right thing to do in the first place. This means that once I’m finished with this I will have to fill and smooth these out all over again but that’s the way it goes when you have no idea what you are doing. Luckily this stuff is forgiving and can easily be fixed. In between these tasks I started putting in all the carpet pieces and trimming as needed to fit around the forward stick boot and fuel pump.
I love days like these as I feel like I was really productive.