First off, as a point of note: the heat wave continues… mid-90’s in the shop later in the evening.  Yes, the heat is a factor that I’m currently dealing with on this build.

Another multi-day blog post here.

I took this later in the evening after I knocked out some final wet sanding on the areas of the bottom wing.  I spent the first half of the day out at Guy’s hangar helping him get his main gear up to snuff.

And here is the bottom of the left aileron, epoxy wiped and left for curing.

Here is some of the work we’re doing on Guy’s Long-EZ, currently on the right gear.  It may be hard to tell, but I repainted pretty much the entire right gear leg yesterday, and today we’re mounting the right axle with the new 1/4″ spacer and 1/16″ thick larger area heat shield.

We discovered that the AN4-25A bolts that Guy had ordered from ACS were too short, plus we didn’t have the right nuts on hand.  I had AN4-26A bolts and the correct nuts at my shop, so we scheduled another round of work to knock this thing out the following day.

Still, here are some pics of the new spacer installed along with the new heat shield.

As yet another side “project,” we discovered that one of Guy’s hangar mates got careless moving around a Grumman Tiger and dinged the nose of Guy’s Long-EZ (sorry, no BEFORE pic as it was HOT and I was working mainly on the gear).

I cleaned up the Quarter sized ding where it chipped the paint off as well as left 2 decent sized scratches across the nose.  We went to a local auto parts store to get some filler, but they only had bigger cans of Bondo or a JB Weld filler, which we tried.  You can see the repair a bit still in the middle of the right hand light reflection.  Another issue was the paint match wasn’t the best, leaving a slightly greenish tint after I painted the nose, so there is a distinction (plus, I don’t claim paint blending as one of my skills!).

That all being said, it does look better than with the big ding and scratches on there, but definitely not better than the original un-damaged nose.

The evening on day 2 after working at Guy’s hangar… he came over to my shop later in the evening to help move the left wing onto saw horses, flipping it back upright in the process.

He also helped me remove the right wing on the wing removal/installation dolly, and then transfer the wing to the wing dolly that the left wing had just previously been on… the right wing of course inverted at this point.

With the left wing back upright, I took the opportunity with first the Fein saw and then a hand sanding block to trim/clean up the top strake-intersection flange on the front face of the wing spar.  Pic 1 shows the before, where I had added in some micro in spots to clean up the lip, and the after pic when it was trimmed, sanded and cleaned up (pic 2).

Although it was getting late, I cut 4 plies of BID off the roll to create the two 2-ply corner BID tapes for topside flanges for both the right wing and strake.  Since it was late I only laid up the glass on the aft top edge of the right strake.  Here we have the 2 plies of BID prepregged and ready for epoxy.

And here is the layup, after peel ply, of the 2-ply corner BID tape that connects the aft top flange underside surface to the aft face of the CS spar, right side of course.

Here we have a shot of the underside surface of the right wing, including the unfinished bottom side of the right winglet intersection fairing.

I noted that although not chipped, the aft bottom corner of my right winglet was quite rounded, so I added the same postage-stamp-sized combo of UNI + BID onto this corner, with peel ply.

I also quickly dug out the TE micro and floxed in an AN-3 sized light washer for securing via magnet my eventual corner cap, which should keep the aft corner from getting damaged and/or puncturing any potential victims.

It’s definitely been a very busy past few days, for both my and Guy’s Long-EZs, respectively.  It was very late, still very hot and so I called it a night.