I started out today by pulling the peel ply off the newly aft positioned glare shield lip.  I then did a pretty decent amount of sanding on the added BID ply seam to get it as evened out as possible.

I’ve been kicking around my final finishing solution of the glare shield for literally years, and now with this required rebuild on the glare shield lip my final layup will be a single ply of carbon fiber.  Which I’ll finish in a dull but visibly appealing final appearance.

Also, with the canopy latching handle assembly and system complete, I ensured all the seals were in place and then checked the fit of the canopy.  What I found on the aft end was not exactly giving me any warm and fuzzy feelings.  There was quite a height difference between the canopy and the turtle deck at the intersecting seam… note the light coming in underneath the straight block.

I hate redoing things, but now was the time to get the turtle-deck spot even with the closed and locked canopy.  I guess long gone are the days of my nice tight seams betwixt canopy and it’s interfacing components.

So after taping up the aft canopy edge and the front edge of the top cowling (and mounting the cowl), I mixed up some micro/West 410 and slathered it on the left (pic 1) and right (pic 2) sides of the turtledeck.

On my list of things to do that I kept can-kicking down the road was sanding the aft edges of the wheel pants that I both micro’d up/sanded and epoxy wiped.  Here’s the right wheel pant.

Here are the tail ends of the micro’d, epoxy wiped and now sanded wheel pants.  On the left pant (pic 1) I had to add a little more micro in a divot that appeared while sanding.  The right wheel pant aft end (pic 2) was good to go after sanding.

Still keeping to my to-do list (today anyway), I also sanded down the added micro on the top/front of each wheel pant.

Many hours later, when the micro on the turtle deck hit the “green” state, I used my razor knife to clean up the seams and remove the excess micro.  I plan on knocking out the initial sanding tomorrow after a good overnight’s cure.

I then spent well over another hour once again assessing and planning out my way ahead on the nose hatch fitting, latch functioning and intermediate latch cable bracket.

At this point it was once again quite late in the evening, so I called it an evening, headed into the house and did another couple of hours of CAD work.

I’ll continue pressing forward with this stuff tomorrow.  Hoo-ah!