Although today was a bit warmer (high 30’s/low 40’s) as compared to yesterday, it was still pretty darn cold.

I started out by spending a good 1.5 hours using my orbital and pad sander with 80 grit paper to sand down the epoxy wiped top cowling.  Yeah, the epoxy had turned bad and was hard as a rock… I waited a day too long to tackle this beast and paid the price!

Here’s a plastic container I left outside the shop, the top of what is now a temporary rainwater bin had over an inch thick slab of ice on it… note the fuzzy background shot of the rinsed off top cowling “baking” in the sun to dry out.

Since I still had daylight left, I grabbed the bottom cowling and spent about the same amount of time on it as I did the top cowling… this was all hand-sanding though with 36 grit sandpaper, using various blocks and tubes to knock down the initially sanded micro.  Although there are some minor divots and low spots, again, I’m very happy with how the bottom cowling is turning out (since I had to reconstruct the aft half of it).

I then got to work doing a couple more rounds of machining on the canopy latch handle down the center slot to clean it up.  I will note that sometimes getting the CAM post processing to do exactly what you want is a pain, so I will be doing one more milling operation by hand to deepen the slot a bit (for clearance) just adjacent to where the internal pivoting rod will be located.

Other than that one-off job, the major machining is complete on the canopy latch handle.  Once I fit it into place in the fuselage side wall and confirm its position, I’ll then drill and tap the top and bottom mounting holes.

With the canopy latch handle machined, I then turned back to the bottom cowling and filled all the current minor divots and low spots with a micro/West 410 filler mix.

I also hit one minor divot on the left Turtledeck shoulder as well, which is the last of the added fills pre-epoxy wipes for that whole area as well.

Tomorrow I’ll sand down the added micro spots and work to get the bottom cowl prepped for epoxy wipes.  I’ll also fine tune the top cowling to get it finalized in its prep for primer and paint.