While I did do some more assessing and part mockups for the canopy latching hardware (more on that in the next day or two), my primary effort today was micro-finishing the outboard winglets.

I first got the left winglet prepped for micro, doing a good final sanding of any previous spots missed and then cleaning it for good micro adhesion.

I then whipped up and slathered on my micro/West 410 mix.  It took 12 pumps worth of West epoxy/hardener to cover the outboard left winglet.

As the left side outboard winglet micro cured, I then set my sights on the right outboard winglet and prepped it for final micro application as I had done on the left.  I have to split the pics between upper and lower since I can’t back up any farther to get these shots: my hand with the camera is up against the wall.

I then slathered on the micro on the outboard right winglet.  I used the same 12 pumps here, but I seemed to have slathered a little bit more towards the top (where I started) so I didn’t have quite the coverage on the lower side.  All good since I clearly have to add more micro on the inboard side of the winglet.

By this point the micro on the outboard left winglet had cured to its “green” stage and was ready for cheese-grating, which I spent a good 20 minutes knocking down all the higher ridges and higher areas.

I really do think this relatively short task is the trick to significantly lowering the time required for sanding after the micro fully cures (24-48 hours) in that you avoid wasting time sanding down the ridges and high spots and start at a much closer level to the final contour.

A few hours later I did the same on the outboard right winglet, with its micro application cured to its “green” stage, I cheese-grated it as well.  Although admittedly it was not as cured as I would have liked, and all the cheese-grating went fine, it was just a tad softer than I normally like it to be so it made removing the more-gummy shavings out of the cheese-grater a bit more of a time-consuming process.  However, it was quite late and I wanted to get the surface cheese grated prior to it curing to a much harder state.

And with that, I called it a night.

Over the next week I’ll be juggling between applying micro on different segments of the bird, cheese-grating and final sanding of these parts.  Later on after nearly all the parts are final sanded and cured, I’ll get to the epoxy wiping.

Pressing forward!