Time: 4 Hours
So I removed the left skirt after making the cuts and still had major shape issues. After scratching my head and asking for Glenn’s advice he noticed that the bend at the top edge of the skirt was up a 1/4″ higher than the right side where the meet the canopy. Wow how did I miss that? So off it came and I filled in all the holes I drilled with micro and waited a day to sand them flush.
Then back on the skirt went but this time in the correct orientation. The fit was much better! Closing the gap in the backend quite a bit. So one problem is now solved and onto the next aft end. The shape was terrible and I just couldn’t get all edges to fit at the same time. So what to do? Glenn says start cutting off a little at a time to you do get a good fit and rebuild what you cut off. So you can see I had to chop a good amount off which scared me since I have very little experience with fiberglass.so to rebuild I needed a bridge to give shape to the initial lay up in this area. I used a file folder cut into the shape to fit into the space and covered it with packing tape so that fiberglass would not stick.
I made a tunnel/cover for the slider rail you can see out of sheet aluminum shaped and sized to fit just over the rail. This will allow for the skirt to slide over the rail when closed. I covered all the rest of the surfaces with packing tap and started the layup. I placed one layer of heavy cloth underneath both edges of the pink skirt and three layers in between the two edges of the pink skirt for my first lay up.
When I came back the next day I found that the layup wasn’t perfect and had a large gap at the top where it met the canopy. Probably due to the black tape not holding down the skirt as tight as it should have. So I removed the entire skirt and cut it in half on the new layup. I removed a little bit from each side so that I could lay it down tight against the canopy and the gap would close. Now that I had it in a tight position against the canopy I did another new layup to close this gap.
At the same time I started using some micro to build up the transition between the pink and the new on the edges for a start.
Boy does this look rough! And it’s gonna take a lot of work I think. When I came back the next day I sanded down the edges to get a close shape and cut off the extra then covered the entire surface with micro so that I could start the shaping process.
More to come on this project. This process takes a lot of time in between work so you can let each step dry before continuing.