I started off today spending yet another couple of hours sanding down the second/gray coat of primer on the gear legs.

I did quite an aggressive sanding to really dial in the shape of the gear legs and fairings, although I primarily used only 320 grit wet sandpaper on this round.  In the process I found about a dozen areas that needed refilling before the next round of primer, which will be white.  Moreover, I’m hoping this next round of primer will be the last coat of primer required before I paint the gear legs.

Since these were mostly very small blemishes and pin-type divots requiring filling, and I didn’t want to wait for a full epoxy cure cycle, I used Metal Glaze to fill them.

After the final sanding and contouring of the gear legs, including the new round of refills, I then mixed up some white primer —without any thickening micro— and applied it to the gear legs.

I painted on a medium coat of the white primer and it came out pretty nice.

Here we have a shot of the gear legs in primer coat #3, white primer…. again, hopefully this will be the last coat of required primer.

As before, I also applied white primer to the Aft Nose/Avionics Cover.

Also as before I didn’t get a “before” shot of the Aft Nose/Avionics Cover sanded and prepped before I laid down this coat of white primer.  As with the gear legs, I’m hoping this will be the last coat of required primer for this part.

I will note that beyond sanding down this coat of white primer on the Aft Nose/Avionics Cover, I won’t be doing anything else with it until I integrate it into the nose, with the canopy, for final fitting, fill and paint.

Tomorrow I plan on finally getting to laying down the first coat of white paint on the nose, fuselage and strakes.

I started out today spending over 2 hours sanding down the first coat of white primer on the gear legs.

The finishing on the parts of these birds is definitely an iterative process to dial in the smoothness and defect-freeness of the surface, and it is getting there . . .  somewhat slowly.  Or at least slower than what I would want it to.

As you can see in these pics, a lot of the white primer was sanded away as I’m getting close to the goal of nice smooth flowing gear legs with no odd protrusions or divots anywhere.

I then mixed up some gray primer with a little bit of micro mixed in to make it a medium grade high build primer, although not nearly as much as I did on the initial white primer coat.

I then painted on a good coat of the gray primer on the gear legs.

I can really see the finish becoming much smoother and blemish-free on the gear legs, but there is always another spot or two lurking to rear their collective ugly heads on the next round…. we’ll see how it looks when I get to the next coat of white primer.

Although I have no pics of the sanded and prepped aft nose/avionics cover, I also coated it with its second/gray coat of primer as well.

I took a break and went out to dinner, and then upon my return I got busy knocking out another flip-prerequisite task of apply sound-deadening foam onto the back of the GIB seat in the hell hole.  Clearly much, much easier to accomplish this feat while the fuselage is inverted and I have good access to the hell hole simply standing on a stool right behind the firewall…. this would not be in any way fun to attempt this from below with the plane upright!

Having spent many hours in the back of Marco’s Long-EZ, JT, I know it can be a bit noisy sitting in the cockpit of these plastic birds with a 320 blasting away behind you.  I wanted to mitigate this noise level as best possible with some lgihtweight noise-reducing foam.

I made templates using leftover blue painters tape that I had pulled off the fuselage from painting the black accent lines, and then before installing the first piece I weighed it to get a good crosscheck and idea of my weight penalty for this stuff.

This piece is just about 25% of the back seat surface area, and it weighed in at 0.6 oz. Not bad.

I then pulled the backing off and stuck it into place on the GIB seatback in the hell hole.

Then came the next piece that would get placed below this one (again, as situated with the fuselage inverted… technically “above” the above piece).  This one weighed in at a whopping 0.45 oz… so looking at just over an ounce per side of the GIB seat, clearly a bit over 2 oz total for the entire seatback to be covered.

I then worked each quadrant to fill in the sound-reducing foam barrier on the back of the GIB seat.  As you can see, I temp installed the AEX LIDAR laser altimeter to ensure I could get it installed as hassle free as possible.

Here we have the upper part of the seatback with the noise-reducing foam in place…

And the other side.

To finish off my noise-mitigating shenanigans I cut a piece of 8″ x 12″ anechoic foam to place in the hell hole to really help muddle up any noise trying to worm its way through to the front.  Since this foam also has a sticky backing, I simply cut a piece of the foam above and secured the 2 pieces together, back to back.

The resulting weight was 1.75 oz.  So about 4 oz total for all the hell hole noise mitigation foam.

Here’s a shot of the “egg crate” anechoic foam ready to go into the hell hole…

And the forward side of it with the noise-reducing foam that I applied previously to the aft side of the GIB seat in the hell hole.

Not a great shot, but this pic gives you an idea of the anechoic foam “plate” shoved into the hell hole to help mitigate the noise.  I’ll probably do some noise tests once I get this bird in the air both with and without this in place —out of simple curiosity— to see how well it’s doing its job.

And with that, I called it a night.

I started out first thing this morning by pulling the edge tape from the nose, fuselage & strake black accent stripes.

I’m very pleased with how the black accent stripes look bordering the blue along the bottom of the nose/fuselage/strakes.

Here’s a shot from slightly off center to show the stripe from nose to firewall.

I’ll note the majority of this blue and black will spend just about every minute out of direct sunlight for the life of this bird, in all practicality.

Again, I’m very pleased with the flow of the black accent stripes from nose to firewall.  This color scheme will of course carry aft onto the bottom cowling.

I then assessed the gear legs and identified all the divots, holes and blemishes that required refilling with West 410… which I then mixed up and applied.

West 410 refills on the gear legs, other side.

Although I didn’t get pics, which would have been a bit tough to tell anyway, I spent about half an hour fine tuning the shape of both gear fairing swooshes, mainly where they respectively met the gear legs.  I would say I shaved (sanded) from about 0.030-0.070″ off to just tweak the curve line and flow from straight trailing edge of the gear legs into the curve of the swoosh.

I then called Jason at Epifanes paints to have a heart-to-heart about this paint.  I spent a good hour on the phone with Jason and got some really good course corrections.  The biggest takeaways were to roll on only (too difficult to tip with just one person), tweak the hardener and thinner numbers a bit to allow a bit longer painting window, and —possibly the biggest Ace in the hole— is the process for post-finishing the paint.

I then got to work wet sanding the primer I re-applied to the white areas of the nose, fuselage and strakes.

I then permanently installed the landing brake on the belly of the fuselage.  I have to say that I’m very pleased with the seams between the landing brake and depression on the bottom of the fuselage.

I’ll also note that I attempted to incorporate the teflon tubing mod in the hinge, but I think this hinge has just a hair too much tension on it when in various positions to allow for a good initial insertion of the teflon tube.  I tried in vain for about a half hour before calling no joy and simply reinserting the original hinge pin.

I guess I’ll deal with wiping away any unsightly stuff that comes from having the original hinge pin installed, but it appears to be working fine.  I’ll further note that I do intend to use the teflon and smaller diameter hinge pin on the ailerons and rudders, which I believe will be a bit more manageable than this beast.

I’m also thrilled about my bling on the inside of the landing brake, and think it adds a really fun element to the design of this bird.

Except for the red characters, the black and white checkerboard pattern with blue border is of course in line with the elements of the airplane’s color scheme.

To show how this landing brake will look when deployed while the bird is on the ground I flipped the above pic…. I’ll call this good! (wink)

Tomorrow I plan on sanding down the white primer and West 410 refills on the gear legs and hit them with a coat of gray primer.  Along with the aft nose/avionics cover as well.

I started out today by hauling the fuselage outside to sand down the epoxy-wiped gear legs.

I figured it would take me 2-3 hours to sand the gear legs, not the 5 hours that it actually took me… the light at the top of the pic below is actually the moon!

After the 5-hour sanding project, I then pulled the fuselage back into the shop.  Next I sanded down the epoxy-wiped refills on the aft nose/avionics cover (in the foreground in the pic below).

I then whipped up some white thickened primer and applied it to the gear legs.

Almost simultaneously with the mixing up of primer, I also mixed up some black paint to recoat the fuselage/nose/strake accent stripe…. which these pics show both the gear legs in primer and the recoated black accent stripe.

I also applied the thickened white primer on the aft nose/avionics cover.

Another shot of the primered aft nose/avionics cover

So my sanding of the gear legs took a lot longer than I expected, meaning I didn’t get nearly as much done as I had planned on today.  Still, knocking out the gear leg sanding and getting them in primer is a significant milestone.  Tomorrow I’ll press forward to finish as many tasks as possible to get this fuselage flipped back upright.

Before I repainted the black accent stripe on the nose/fuselage/strake I cleaned up the fuselage-side landing brake hinge.

After cleaning the hinge, as I did last night on the actual landing brake, I then test fitted the landing brake into the fuselage landing brake depression.  I’m very happy with the fit of the landing brake into the fuselage.

I then repainted the black accent stripe on the nose/fuselage/strakes (see below).

After the landing brake test fit, I then removed the painters tape to reveal the blue border along with my checkerboard bling.  There were a couple of paint runs, one on each side, that I scraped with a razor blade.  So before I grabbed this shot I cheated and covered these scraped runs with blue tape.

As for the paint, I’m not overly happy with it.  Again, it looks great from 6-10 feet away, but closer up you can see some minor runs, brush strokes and dust.  Moreover, the painting process itself is hit or miss.  It requires a near-perfect application of paint to get it to come out looking nice, and has to be applied very quickly to keep it from drying too quickly as its being tipped.

My major angst with this paint is that there is just very little room for error as it’s pretty much a one shot deal.  If there is a hair or piece of debris that needs to be removed as the paint is being applied, you have a window of about 5 seconds before needing to move forward.  There is just no wiggle room and it’s a razor’s edge of being an acceptable success or a surface that will require a recoat.

That all being said, the black paint stripe will need another coat.

The nose hatch door would have been a done deal if I hadn’t kissed it with a paint brush while mucking about with painting the nose gear fairing right next to it.  With that little blight on the midpoint edge of the nose hatch door, it had to be dealt with.  So before I moved forward with the next blue coat of paint on the canopy frame I wanted to see if I could buff out and polish the paint on the nose hatch door.

I wet sanded the nose hatch door paint starting with 1200 grit, then 1500 grit and finished up with 2000 grit.  After the sanding I used cutting compound, then polishing compound to see if I could bring back a shine.  Nope. Nada.

Now, to be clear, I was told that I would be able to buff out this paint.  I have done a fair bit of automotive style base coat/clear coat painting effort, and this paint does not buff out like clear coat, although when cured it is super glossy like clear coat.

With that, I cleaned the surface twice with acetone, then a couple rounds of denatured alcohol.  I then wet sanded the surface with 500 grit paper in prep for another coat of paint.

With my newfound knowledge in hand, I pressed forward with my blue painting tasks.  I’ll note that each time I painted the black accent stripe I had a fair bit of paint left over in the cup when finished.  Using the amount of total paint used for the stripe as a baseline, I of course thought I had enough to not only paint the canopy, but the nose hatch door as well.  Well, as par usual with this painting effort I shot myself in the foot by not mixing up enough blue paint to complete the canopy frame painting [I think a big difference in required amount was using brush only vs foam roller, which soaks up a lot more paint].

Not to toot my own horn, but I actually nailed the paint application on the aft 80% of the canopy before my paint started running out.  This caused a too thin application for tipping on the front canopy skirt area.

I could tell that the paint was too thin on this forward area, and my attempted tipping was going to leave some brush grooves that would require a fair bit of sanding.  Begrudgingly of course, I accepted that this was going to require yet another coat.  Thus, to mitigate the amount of future sanding required I simply smoothed out the paint on the forward frame/skirt with the roller.

Here’s the aft frame of the canopy… and it definitely is acceptable.  So, the goal is to repeat this success for the entire canopy frame (groan).

Back into the realm of my great looking “6-foot-plus” paint job, I mounted the nose gear fairing and doors to check their fit and appearance.  Also note the black painted accent stripe.

Here’s another shot of the nose showing the nose gear fairing with the gear doors closed.

And a wider angle shot of the repainted black accent stripe, installed nose gear fairing & gear doors, as well as the repainted blue canopy frame.

When I repainted the nose hatch door it came out ok.  There were definite streaks I saw from tipping, so I rewetted the brush just a tad to smooth out the streaks, but the paint had clearly passed the stage where it wanted to play nice, so a mottled mess ensued.  By this point I’ll admit my frustration got the best of me.  I grabbed the roller, loaded what little bit was left in the tray and recoated the door before aggressively tipping it out.

Well, this paint was not going to reward such rogue behavior! I don’t know if it was the reapplication action of putting on a second coat, or that my roller and/or brush got contaminated, but the resulting coat was simply awful… clearly yet another sanding and recoating required.

The “contaminated” paint carried over to my taxi light frame as well, which too turned out awful and will need yet even more sanding and a recoat.

The patch on the fuselage near the firewall turned out acceptable, although there is some contamination in this paint as well.  This is the required patch from me sanding through my tape into the paint on the sidewall.

It does have just a slight edge to it, and that dust stuff going on.  I’ll watch it and evaluate further.  Yes, call me crazy but I’ll sand this first patch coat down and reapply another coat.

Here’s a shot of the patch from a few feet away.  Time will tell how noticeable it is.

Wanting to clear my thoughts of a not-so-stellar painting day, I tackled the final removal of the half of the oxygen bottle mounting tube (I had taken it off while it was still somewhat pliable then taped back into place).  I’ll lay up the other half in the next day or two.

And with that, I closed up shop and called it a night.

With a clear blue sky, albeit much cooler than the last couple of days, I pulled the fuselage outside to finally sand down the main gear legs’ micro refill for what would be the final time before epoxy wiping them.

Here’s the fuselage outside along with the right wing.

To reiterate the woes of winter building, when I pointed my phone to take this shot it was 3:59 pm.  When I looked at my phone afterwards it had flipped to 4 pm on the spot.  That is the sun peeking through the trees on the side of my shop.  Clearly not a lot of usable daylight these winter months for building . . .

After about an hour’s worth of sanding I was happy with the results of the micro/West 410 refill.  Although I have a couple of spots that are suspect, I decided they’re not worth another refill until I see how they look after 4-5 coats of epoxy.

And I did do a number of touchups on my sanding job after I snapped these pics.

I also redriilled the holes in the wheel pant flanges for the screws and CAMLOCs.

I also countersunk the holes for the front 3 positions which are for CS #10 screws.

And here’s one last shot before I put the bird back inside the shop.

I then knocked out the first of 4 epoxy wipes.

On epoxy wipe #2 I sanded down the spot refills on the aft nose/avionics cover and hit those spots with another round of epoxy wipes.

Also in between epoxy wipes I cleaned up the hinges on the landing brake, both by removing the paint on the inside edges of each hinge tab and by clearing out the paint in the hinge pin holes.

I then drilled all the countersinks for the CS #10 screws with countersunk washers and installed the hinge screws.

As example of what the landing brake will look like when installed, I then set the landing brake actuator mounting screws in place.

I then prepped the RAM air scoop/hell hole hatch cover for mounting by drilling the countersinks in the holes.  I also redrilled the 4 CAMLOC holes as well to clear out the slight bit of excess paint.

It was past midnight when I finally finished epoxy wipe #4.

I don’t think a 5th epoxy wipe would add much, if any, value so I called it good at #4.

I’ll let the epoxy cure for a couple of days before sanding it down for primer.  Tomorrow I’ll focus on the last (hopefully) coat of the fuselage black accent stripe and some more blue paint antics.

I started off today by whipping up a mixture of micro and West 410 in a ratio of about 20% micro to 80% West 410 to do some significant refills on the main gear micro finish.

In many respects, on good portions of the gear legs I did what could be best described as a skim coat since I had some major areas of the original fill that were a bit thin. In the remaining spots I was much more targeted in my refills.

I then got busy to knock out the wing/strake junction lip internal 2-ply BID layup. I did a final sanding and cleanup before laying up the prepregged 2-ply BID tapes, and then applying peel ply to the layup.  Here is the final result.

I then did the same thing on the bottom lip of the left strake.  I used MGS 335 with fast hardener, and as I mentioned before, it cured so fast that I failed to get pics of the layups and peel ply before having to pull the peel ply and razor trimming the glass edge while still just pliable enough to cut a bit easier.  So below is the final result on the strake side.

Regardless, these inside reinforcement BID tapes on the wing/strake junction lips are finished for all the bottom edges.

I then did a sideline task in prep for when the fuselage is back upright… a pre-strake closeout task: glassing a mounting bracket for the Mountain High Oxygen bottle.  This mounting bracket/sleeve is an attempt to lighten up the Oxygen system by replacing the metal mounting brackets that weigh in at well over half a pound.

It should also make pulling and replacing the bottle for refilling much easier than using the stock metal mounting brackets.

Since I wanted to be able to get the bottle out of the glassed sleeve after I laid up the glass, I decided to make it in 2 parts to be combined after it was removed from the bottle, which is acting as a mold plug.  My glass layup schedule for this bracket is 2 plies of UNI with 2 plies of BID.

After laying up the UNI-BID-UNI-BID glass, I then peel plied the layup and set it aside to cure.

I then spent well over an hour sanding down the black accent stripe on each side of the nose/fuselage/strake in prep for a second coat.  I then mixed up some black paint and painted the second coat of black on the nose/fuselage/strake accent stripe.

I wanted to get this second coat of black on the accent stripe painted tonight so that tomorrow it will be cured enough to allow me to sand the micro refill on the gear legs.

I used a different brush on this round of black painting to tip it, and I will note that it worked much better than the expensive brush I bought specifically for this purpose.

Moreover, the wet sanding really knocked down the rough spots and provided a good base coat of black for this second coat. But I did note after this second coat cured a bit that it will need one more round of sanding to really get it to final smooth with a final/third coat of black.  I plan on doing that Monday.

I’ll concurrently work the gear leg finishing and priming with the final coat of black on the accent stripe, then the 2 coats of white paint minimum on the bottom of the nose, fuselage and strakes.  I’m thinking by next weekend this fuselage will be really close to being ready to be flipped back upright.

I started out very early this morning by cutting BID for 2 each 2-ply BID tapes for the wing-to-strake interface lips on the interior corners of both the right wing and right strake. These BID tapes are about 1″ wide.

I first laid up the wing side junction lip corner 2-ply BID tape after creating a micro fillet in the corner gap between the curved wing corner edge and the lip.  Since this is a cosmetic piece I’m not going to bother with adding more weight with flox… micro will do.

The main thing that this added glass does is ensure that the lip glass doesn’t peel off if I miscalculate while installing or removing the wing and smack it.  I would rather have to fill a ding than replace glass and do more micro and paint work.

As you can see, I then pretty much did the same thing on the strake side, except this layup was upside down.

I used MGS 335 with fast hardener, and boy was that sucker fast!  Here they are a few hours later with peel ply pulled and razor trimmed.

The weather today called for overcast and/or partly cloudy, but no rain at all.  I moved the right wing outside onto my wing sawhorses and then proceeded to take the left wing off. It was a tad fiddly but not bad at all… again, I’m very glad I reversed the inboard wing bolt as it makes it much easier getting the wings on and off.

Here’s a shot of the wingless bird ready to get moved outside.

The plan was to move the fuselage outside to sand down the micro on the gear legs and keep from making a mess in my shop.  I added paper and cardboard to protect the black and blue paint  (or so I thought! See below…) and was ready to rock and roll!

I took this shot just after I moved the fuselage outside.

Then . . .

5 minutes later the sky opened up with a very steady downpour of rain.  I scurried to get plastic over the gear legs, but it drenched all my fuselage protecting paper, etc.

Needless to say I was super pissed….  The rain subsided in about 15 minutes, but it continued to mist for a good half hour more.

The problem was that I was already a day or two overdue on getting the micro on the gear legs sanded.  And although I mixed in West 410, it was getting tougher to sand every day. So after the actual rain stopped I started sanding, but had to clear out my boards quite often since of course the rain got all my sanding boards wet.

Not only was I trying to get this micro knocked down, but I wanted to get back on schedule with painting the fuselage/nose/strake black accent stripe.

I was also due to depart in a couple of hours for an early night out with Jess… so I was behind the power curve and rushed. Not always a good combo.  And it wasn’t.

In my flurry to get the micro on the gear legs sanded, I got a bit too aggressive with my sanding board and cut through 2 plies of duct tape and a ply of blue painters tape, nicking the back edge of the fuselage right at the firewall.

Needless to say, I was really pissed off at this point.

After I returned from dinner I applied some Metal Glaze to the paint wound.

A while later I sanded down the filler and then applied white primer to the patch.  I’ll sand down the primer in the next day or so, and when I do the final coat of blue on the canopy frame I’ll add a dollop here.

The last thing I did for the evening was to remove all the foam and tape from the strake-to-wing intersection lip on the left wing (forgive my atrocious wing glass here… it was very early on in the build when I was still a huge noob).  I also did the same on the aft side of the left strake, although I didn’t get a pic of it.

Here it is cleaned up and ready for glass.

With that, I called this work day over.

After the rain disrupted my plans yesterday, I had tried to get the fuselage taped up to allow me to paint the first coat of the black accent stripe paint… but alas, the painstaking task of taping up the edge of the existing blue paint proved to take too long so I punted it off for today.

I spent nearly a half hour per side simply applying the tape to the edge of the existing blue fuselage paint.  I then finished taping on paper to protect the blue paint from any errant application of the black accent stripe paint.

As you can see, I then painted up the black accent stripe on the nose, fuselage and strakes.

A bit after I painted the black accent stripes, I then spent a good hour sanding the blue paint on the canopy frame.  It sanded out fairly well and after just a couple of minor tweaks it will be ready for another round of blue paint.

I then spent a good little bit of time prepping & organizing the shop for wing removal, starting with the right wing.

I have to say, after having reversed that inboard wing bolt the wing comes off WAY easier now than it did before.

Here we have the wing/strake intersection lip on the wing.  Clearly there’s still foam and tape leftover from where I filled the gap for the initial intersection lip layups.

I then cleaned up the lip in prep for a 2-ply layup of BID that I’ll do first thing tomorrow.

I also cleaned up the underside of the wing/strake intersection lip (as it sits currently) on the strake.

It was simply too late to start any lay-ups ….  I plan on doing them first thing tomorrow.

As I was creating the day’s task list this morning, which focused on removing the wings to allow me to take the fuselage outside and sand down the micro on the gear legs, I then started hearing drops of rain on my roof… and once it began it didn’t stop.

Well, flexibility is the key to airpower . . .

So I pivoted and decided to tackle the issue I identified a couple of days ago when I attempted to reinstall the EZ Nose Lift nose gear actuator.  The arm on the actuator was actually catching the NG3 bracket since it extended out beyond the internal NG4 bracket on all sides.  It may have been easier to deal with this before I reset these brackets in place with industrial adhesive, but I figured the clearance was tight before and I didn’t see anything changing from the previous setup.

Well, I miscalculated that just a bit since the actuator arm would not mount inside of the NG3/4 bracket to then be secured with the AN4 bolt.

My concern about trimming away the excess NG3 bracket was HEAT.  I didn’t want to infuse too much heat into the brackets and thus destroy the industrial adhesive bond that I had just worked in an effort to have a more secure NG3/4 bracket vs using flox in the bond.

Well, with the somewhat thicker stainless steel acting as a heat sink of sorts, and with the great heat resistant properties of stainless steel, heat didn’t really prove to be near the issue that I thought it might.

Here we have the first vertical edge of the NG3 trimmed away using the Dremel Tool with a cutoff disk.

As I was finishing up yesterday’s blog post, I would simply cut an edge (as above) then would wait 20 minutes or so for all heat to dissipate before cutting the next edge, which here is the other vertical aft edge of the NG3 bracket.  As you can see, I was simply trimming the exterior NG3 bracket to match the internal edges of the NG4 bracket.

The main “snagging” culprits in denying the proper clearance to the nose lift gear actuator arm were the aft vertical and top (inverted here) angled edges.  So next up was the top angled edge of the NG3 bracket, which I marked here with a Sharpie . . .

And trimmed away as we see here in this outside shot.

And a shot of the edge alignment between the NG3 and NG4 brackets.

I then repeated trimming the top angled NG3 edge on the other side.  I then took just a hair off the “corner” where the vertical edges met the lower angled edges (top here as inverted).

I then took a file to the trimmed edges of the NG3 bracket to clean it all up.  Trying to get the Dremel Tool in to make these cuts, with the nose gear channel underneath the leather shop apron had my Dremel hand moving at odd angles over an irregular surface… which unfortunately resulted in a couple small kisses on the edge of the NG3 with the Dremel cutoff disk… no structural damage of course, just a couple unsightly nicks.

Nonetheless, this task is complete and it allowed for a fairly easy insertion of the EZ Nose Lift gear actuator arm to then be mounted to the NG3/4 brackets.

Here’s a closer shot of the remounted EZ Nose Lift gear actuator arm in the NG3/4 brackets.

And a shot of the EZ Nose Lift gear actuator arm transiting the white painted nose gear strut channel.  I of course remounted the nose gear actuator with the new pivot bolts and pins into the NG30 nose gear brackets.  This was a tricky feat going in from below and doing it all inverted, and took a good 45 minutes to accomplish.

I then hooked up the nose gear actuator to power and tested it out.  To be clear, this was the first ops check of not only the geometry of the physically remounted nose gear actuator, but also a test of the molex connector that I inserted into the nose gear wiring circuit to allow easy disconnection and removal of the NG30 cover.

As the rain continued to pour I decided to knock out another pre-flip (back upright) task: the final installation of the GIB thigh support sump tanks fuel drain valves.

I first removed the red plastic NPT plugs that I had installed to protect the threaded ports during the fuselage painting process.  There was a slight ridge of paint around the edge of the ports so I used a 1/2″ drill bit to remove these respective paint ridges.

I spent a good hour researching the sealant I should use to keep these fuel drain valves from leaking.  I visited our building buddies over in the VANs aircraft forum (VAF) as well as consulting my notes.  Asking what the best fuel sealant is to airplane builders is about like asking people who the best sports team is… the responses are all over the map.

One sealant that kept seeming to get rave reviews is the same sealant Matco calls out for use on all their brake fittings: Loctite 567.  And if you read its label it looks like just about all the other sealants folks are using: Permatex #2 or #3, Tightseal, and Rectorseal, etc. PTFE seeming to be the main underlying ingredient in all of them.

So, with Loctite 567 in hand, I pressed forward.

I will say the one area of agreement with most plane builders is to avoid thread tape like the plague, with a few old hands saying that once it’s used it will contaminate the threads and allow introduction of it into the fuel system.  Well, I did use it as a temp seal to check for leaks in my fuel system with water… thus, I very thoroughly cleaned all the threads on the fuel drain valves as well as the female NPT threads of the sump drain ports on the belly of the bird.

I then applied the Loctite 567 to the threads as per the instructions and installed the sump fuel drain valves into the fuselage…. hopefully for the only and last time!

Tomorrow I plan to get back to my shenanigans of sanding down the micro on the gear legs and back to painting the fuselage and strakes.