Ok, I’m tracking a lot of targets right now, mostly all dealing with knocking out the plane’s centerline component tweaks to allow for final micro finishing in prep for paint.

I worked a good bit on the nose hatch hinge inboard vs outboard mounting spacing in tweaking those to attain a better hatch door fit onto the hatch opening’s perimeter flange when closed.  Although I didn’t get it all the way, it was much improved and I have some ideas on a few more tweaks to get it where I want it to be.

That being said, I actually started off with remicroing some spots on the just remicro’d/sanded turtledeck.  About an hour after adding the new micro I ensured the turtledeck’s common edge with the canopy was clear and opened up the canopy.  Not surprisingly, I’ll need to do yet another round of micro on the front edge of the added turtledeck micro, as well as probably a few touch-ups on the aft junction with the top cowling.

I used a full pump of the West epoxy to mix up the micro, so as I expected I had some left over.  I had removed the back “half” of the left wheel pant to tape up the front half middle vertical seam on both the inboard and outboard sides.  I then remounted the back half of the wheel pant with all the hardware… then with the remaining mixed micro from the above turtle deck spot fill, I applied micro to the aft side of the seam (to the back half’s front edge at the seam).  Again, on both sides of the left wheel pant.

I’ll note I was planning on doing the same thing on the right wheel pant, but I couldn’t find my 90° angled screwdriver to remove a very low CAMLOC… after 10 minutes of hard searching I gave up and punted to allow me to move forward.  I’ll get it in the next day or few.

Moreover, one may ask why I’m working the wheel pants now given that a good bunch of my 40 hour flyoff will be sans wheel pants.  Well, I figure with the relatively small size of the pants, they will be my “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to my initial priming and painting ops.  These will be some of the first things I shoot when it comes to primer and paint, to allow optimized dialing in of flow rates, fan sizes, and even color verification.

I then turned my attention to yet another centerline task, which is repositioning the front left CAMLOC receptacle on the aft nose/avionics cover.  Why?  Well, that edge on the left side, just forward of the canard leading edge, needs to be down/in about a 0.08″ to better align cover and forward nose at the seam.

So I drilled out the rivets and removed the CAMLOC receptacle.  Then I filled in one rivet hole and the majority of the center hole with flox (I sanded down and used a carbon fiber disc both as filler and to help ID the original hole position).  I left it to cure overnight and after a final elevation check I will remount the CAMLOC receptacle slightly higher —to pull that cover corner in a hair for better seam elevation alignment with the nose.

After a good half hour of assessment and pondering on next canopy seam finishing steps, and annotating a good number of notes (plus some more CAD stuff and kicking off some 3D prints), I called it a night.