November 5, 2006

Filling and sanding. Filling and sanding. I’m really getting bored of filling and sanding! On the bright side though, it’s starting to look nearly finished. Well until the primer is sprayed on anyway!

I can’t remember which iteration the shot below is. There have been so many. I broke down and removed the canopy rails so I could fill the gap between the roll over bar and the windshield in the lower areas a little better. It’s now infinitely easier to work on and sand. I don’t know why we didn’t do that earlier.

Are you bored with sanding yet? How about filling?

Just in case you’re not… Here’s another shot of some more filling and sanding.

In between filling and sanding I did some more filing and sanding on the cowling. Well, technically not filler, but fibreglass, and almost as bad. I cut some foam pieces to close out the ends of the intake ramps. This will stop the air swirling around and going where it’s not supposed to be going. I glassed all these in nice and tidy and also bridged the gap on the outer sides. I forgot to take a picture of the fibreglassing because I got otherwise distracted by visitors!

I decided it was time to make these two halves fit together properly. I wrapped the lower cowling flange with electrical tape and put some PVA release agent on there. Once that was dry, I roughed up the inside of the top half and mixed up some flox peanut butter. I then pasted the flox into the upper cowling, and then put them both together so that they are a perfect form fit.

Here they are together. I may end up having to use dynamite or something to get the clecoes out. When this went together, the flox peanut butter oozed out nicely. I smoothed it off and left it to set up. Tomorrow I’ll pull them apart and put the screws in with nutplates.

Here’s a close up of one of the joints. While I hate this fibreglassing stuff, it’s really pretty cool what you can do with it.

Haha! Just when you thought you’d done filling and sanding!