I started out this morning attending my local EAA chapter’s monthly meeting, which turned out to be amazingly productive.

After having a nice post-breakfast chat with a local Grumman Tiger owner and my fellow canardian buddy, Guy, a group of us went over to the airport to help a fellow EAA’er, Joe, with his airworthiness inspection on his just-finished (and very nice!) RV-10.

At one point the DAR was discussing Joe’s flight test area, and after a couple of questions (and this pic) the DAR started discussing what my upcoming 40-hour fly off test area would be, since the Long-EZ is a bit faster than the RV-10.  After discussing the Airworthiness Cert inspection and paperwork process, I got the DAR’s business card… it’s great to have met face to face, discuss my bird and my build, and how to get ‘er in the air!

Moreover, a new EAA member is a new (to me anyway) CFI at the airport and we discussed doing my BFR soon… like I said, a very productive day!

By the time I got into the shop it was very late afternoon.  I spent a decent bit of time getting the contour of the lower cowling baffle rib’s “outriggers” (or ‘wings’) transferred over into cardboard jigs.  Which I then used as templates to cut out 2 plies of carbon fiber per side, and both inside and outside segments of peel ply.

With the tape on the cardboard jigs serving as mold release, I then taped them into place on the lower cowling.  After which, I mixed up some HTR-212 high temp epoxy and wet out the aft face of the jigs and the cowl surface.

I then wet out and laid up my inside pieces of peel ply, followed by a micro fillet in the corner, pretty much the entire length of the outrigger jigs.

And laid up 2 plies of carbon fiber per side.

And peel plied the carbon fiber layups.

The tricky part of this layup was letting it cure for a few hours (it was getting quite late) to allow the epoxy to get into its “green” state (just starting to really set up, but not totally cured) to allow me to pull off the cardboard jigs, trim the layups down a good bit (it was too hard to do that with the cardboard jigs in place, which was my initial plan).

I then set the jigs back in place and mounted the bottom cowling into place on the bird to allow the aft baffle ribs —which also serve as bottom cowl STIFFENERS— to cure with the bottom cowl in its mounted position.

After all that, I called it a night!