I actually started out today by putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s blog post.  I was quite tired after the long haul yesterday, too much so to finish my post.

I then ran up to the Dulles airport area to pick up some of my stuff from friends who have been using/storing it.

After grabbing some lunch and returning home, and unloading the goods, I then got busy on finishing up the final few tasks I needed to that would allow me to glass in the GIB headrest.

First up was cutting out opening in the left headrest sidewall for the cooling fan intake.  I also drilled the corner holes for the mounting screws as well.

I then test-fitted the cooling fan.

And then tried out a mocked up installation of the cooling fan inlet cover bracket.

I then snapped the inlet cover/filter element into place.  Looks like this will work just spiffy!

Here’s a rather artistic shot (ha!) of the 2 cooling fan mounts.

Another shot just showing the CAMLOC mounting through holes in the headrest top plate.

I then prepped and floxed in the upper CAMLOC brackets for securing the GIB headrest front cover.  As you can see by this pic, I had taken it a bit later after actually all the floxing as I had since cut out all the glass (BID) required to glass the headrest structure into the fuselage, on the front face of the firewall.

To flox in the upper CAMLOC brackets I had to use a scrap piece of glassed 3/8″ foam on each side to keep the bracket tight against the backside of the top plate.

As I was prepping to whip up some epoxy for glassing the headrest into the fuselage, a giant hornet flew into my shop and started buzzing around (I’m guessing that’s what it is, to be honest I don’t know the true taxonomy of this insect…)  I was willing to let his trespassing into my sacred shop go unchallenged, but he then entered into a fairly aggressive posture, forcing me to employ countermeasures!  I hit him with a few shots of Simple Green, wetting his wings down so he death spiraled to the floor…. the death part of that action coming from my shoe compressing his earthly form into the concrete underneath!  In short, I killed the obnoxious little bastard . . . (ok, actually quite huge!)

So over 2 hours later this is what popped out the other end of the night’s endeavor: one GIB headrest, floxed and glassed in place on top of the CS Spar and on the front side of the firewall!  (…. yay!)

Here’s a shot from the other side.  Obviously I can now put all my efforts into the nose and canopy builds.

With the GIB headrest installed, tomorrow will be all about final preps and the no kidding real official start of the nose and canopy builds!