This blog post covers the past few days, where I am still primarily focused on all the centerline areas of the bird in order to finalize the micro-finishing for the canopy intersect areas, as well as the nose hatch and nose.

I started off by adding micro to both the front vertical edge of the glare shield (that makes up the seam with the front edge of the canopy skirt) and the front 1/3 of the left longeron where it interfaces with the canopy edge lip.  I then peel plied both of these micro applications.

The application of micro on the front 1/3 of the left longeron completes the addition of micro along this left longeron for the initial application.  Again, this is essentially a micro hard-shelling task since this addition is too small (IMO) to use pour foam.

A single ply BID tape along this edge seems like it should be a fairly quick job, but it took an entire afternoon.  Here are the aft 2 plies of BID (there were different heights needed to cover the side strip of micro), prepregged in plastic and ready for layup.

After a final sanding of the cured micro strip along the left longeron, and then another application of micro into some of the remaining grooves and divots, I laid up the 1-ply BID tape covering the micro vertical edge and overlapping onto the bare fiberglass just beneath it.  I then peel plied the layup.

Here we have the next day… when I then discovered an issue that for the life of me I swore I had nailed down, since it’s really the core purpose for this task: the new layup over the underlying micro was proud of the canopy edge by a good 0.05″ on the front half of the left longeron.

I was dumbfounded.  I swore I had double and triple checked the edges in relationship to each other on both canopy and longeron.  Of course I was not happy.

Nothing to do but fix this cluster ****!  I grabbed the Fein saw and cut off the glass on the front half of the longeron.  I then stripped off ALL the tape protecting the canopy lip, closed and locked it and then sanded the micro to BELOW/INSIDE the surface level of the canopy lip.

Of course the micro had some significant divots and gouges in it from the Fein saw, so another round of micro was required.

Once the micro was cured, and another round of sanding complete, I then redid the front half layup on the left longeron.  Here is the result of that.

And a shot of the now complete first major task in cleaning up the left longeron and matching it up to look nice with the the canopy frame.

In that vein, I also did a thorough sanding of the right longeron, which I honestly have barely touched since I laid up the top skin of the right strake (pic 1).  To keep the micro jobs manageable, I micro’d only the aft half of the right longeron, including along the corner intersection with the strake top micro (pic 2).

I then did a final cross check of the aft outboard corners of the aft nose/avionics cover where the glare shield front corners start.  I need to round these corners to get those tri-corners dialed in where aft nose cover meets sidewall meets canopy frame.

I laid up a ply of BID each side on the inside of the aft nose/avionics cover, then peel plied both sides of the BID before setting it aside to cure overnight.

I then got back to the right longeron and micro’d up the next section going forward.  Here’s how that looked:

And here’s the entire right side strake/longeron/canopy micro situ at the current moment.  I’ll of course be working this more tomorrow going forward.

Pushing onward!