So today was a transition day, with a lot of odd jobs and bits getting worked, and of course tons of sanding.

I started off by knocking down the epoxy wiped right wing, winglet, rudder and aileron top very carefully with 80 grit sandpaper.  Just enough to get it smooth and all the shiny areas dulled.  Tomorrow I plan to wet sand it with 150 grit sandpaper and a long board, as Cory Bird describes in his finishing how-to instructions.

I had done some fills on the left side, and one such task was filling in the edges of the left baggage pod’s top wing mounting screw holes, which had chipped a decent bit as I uncovered them.  I used a very thin amount of grease on some spare 10-32 SS screws and used them to keep the flocro out of the holes (pic 1), and as you can see it really worked a treat (pic 2).

I also employed another technique for micro finishing these birds that I found in a Central States Association (CSA) newsletter article.  It’s a rather simple method of finding the high spots on a wing or strake by using an aluminum “yardstick,” or any long piece of straight aluminum, to find the high spots.  You simply slide the edge back and forth on random intervals, using different axes and a pattern shows up where the high points —or ridges— are (pic 1).

I’ll do this a good 6-8 times, then mark up the surface (see below) and sand the entire surface 1-2 times before back to finding the high points.  I will note that after I got the surface as level as possible on the right strake, I still needed to backfill a small patch at the aft inboard area that was a bit too low compared the surrounding surface (pic 2).

I then got busy sanding the top of the left wing to finalize its contour in prep for the next step: epoxy wipes.  I started by marking up the entire top of the left wing using a pencil, the poor man’s guide coat if you will (pic 1).  I then spent a good couple of hours dialing in the surface of the top wing, and I’m happy to report that it is complete and ready for some epoxy wipes… although I still need to finalize the left winglet before that happens.

Tomorrow my goal is to get the right strake epoxy wiped, and finish sanding the left winglet so that the left wing and winglet can be epoxy wiped the following day (the goal anyway).  I need to fit in some sanding on the epoxy wiped surfaces of course too… yes, I’ve had to do some crazy juggling of tasks over the past couple of weeks to get all this micro finishing done before the cold weather comes rolling in… at some point.

But I’m still pressing forward!