Over the past few days I’ve primarily been focused on getting the strake hatch doors, latches and flanges finished up.  This involves a number of iterations of micro, flocro and flox fills, with the requisite cure times, sanding, refills and dialing in the edge seams and height/elevations to get the door tops as even with the surrounding strake surfaces as possible.  Of course, some contour-leveling sanding no doubt will be required.

In addition, I’ve been working a myriad of small divot and low spot micro fills, sanding, wet sanding, subsequent epoxy wipes, etc. on areas all over the bird: wings, winglets, flanges, fairings, D-deck, strake, nose cover, etc.

On the right strake hatch flange I filled the slight “trench” around the outer perimeter edge of the flange with flocro before then covering that with peel ply.

I did the same a bit later with the left side strake hatch flange, but no pic of it.

Here is the 1-ply carbon fiber layup on the inside of the left strake hatch door, after I razor trimmed it and pulled the peel ply.  Obviously it’s installed in place, and you can see the forward flange (right side of pic) has been trimmed as well.

I then spent a good hour+ drilling the holes in the left strake hatch door to install the double-button Hartwell latch.  Here we have an external shot of the latch (pic 1) and an internal one as well (pic 2).

And a couple requisite shots of the left strake hatch door latch from different angles.

As for how the hatch doors sit within the strakes’ top proper, the seams around the doors needs some filling.

Thus, to be able to get the door open, off and out of the edge flocro that I applied to the taped edge of the door, I only did about half the perimeter edge for each application.  I started with the aft side on the right strake door hatch.

And after the aft side cured I then flocro’d the forward side edge seam.

Here is a shot of the same thing on the left strake hatch, although I started on the forward (top of pic) side —which is complete in this pic— and am working the flocro application on the aft side half of the edge seam here.

Slowly the strake hatches, doors, latches, fit and finish work is getting completed and I’ll pick back up more on the aft nose/avionics cover and canopy final fit and finish.

Again, all in the effort to get this bird in primer and paint.

Pressing onward!