Although the outside temp was below freezing (~30° F), I wanted to get the micro on the bottom cowling rough sanded before it cured hard as a rock.

I spent over 45 minutes sanding it, but took breaks about every 10 minutes to go into the shop to thaw out my freezing cold hands!  I’m really pleased with how the bottom cowl shape and contour is turning out.  I plan on sanding it more thoroughly by hand either tomorrow or the next day.

I then got back to work on the canopy latch handle.  I decided to do some hole drilling down the center of the deep slot to clear out some material to help out my end mills as they gut out the center of the handle.  I used 4 different sized drill bits as I settled in and just drilled for about an hour… the final biggest bit holes are shown in the next pic.

Here we have the canopy latch handle with a good bit of the center slot material drilled out on the drill press.  Again, this should make the job of removing all the slot material much less stressful (read: less heat and more accurate) on my end mills.

Just as drilling out the slot material, this machining job took a good little bit (about 1-1/2 hour) to nug out, since I used multiple step down passes to mill the slot.

Now, this is just the initial slot material clearance machining, whereas tomorrow we’ll get more dialed in on our specs and make this thing look much nicer.

Still, looking good so far (IMO) and I’m very pleased with how this is turning out.

Pressing onward!