Although not really shown in any of the pics below, the last couple of days have been about SANDING, SANDING, SANDING… oh, and more sanding.  Mainly sanding the epoxy wiped areas on the rudders, winglets, inboard wing root edges, cowl shoulders, turtle deck, longerons, and fuselage sidewalls.

Then divot and depression refills with micro, more sanding, more minor touchups and fills… ad nauseum.

As for the glassed inboard ends of the elevators, those layups came out very nicely: I pulled the peel ply, razor cut the edges and then did a quick sanding to clean them up.

With the weather now fairly warm (high 80’s…yeah, all or nothing!) I took the elevators outside and gave them a thorough sanding in prep for micro.

I also took the canard outside (I had already sanded the inboard edges of the canard and micro’d those edges  up) to sand down the new added micro.

Which I did next.  This is to fill the edges that were uncovered by the aft nose/avionics cover.

I couple of years ago I read in the Central States Newsletter that polyester filler glaze is incompatible with composite finishing.  Well, many, many years prior to my reading that, I had followed suit with Nate Mullins as he was just finishing up his Long-EZ build, where he had used Z Grip filler on his bird.

Now, while Z Grip does not claim to be a polyester filler, it is from Evercoat.  And I had a decent amount of Evercoat’s Metal Glaze on hand, which states right out that it is a polyester filler glaze.  Both are a light bluish green in color, and both are applied fairly easily and sand easily (after about a quick 20 minute cure time).

Since my only micro finishing project at the time was the canard, I too employed this type of easy-to-apply/quick curing/EZ sanding filler on the canard (this was my pre-West 410 discovery).

Well, after a quick text chat with Nate today I confirmed that he had had some issues with his Z Grip filler “any application over 1/16″ deep” and again, that’s not even a polyester based filler (that I know of).  My Metal Glaze is a confirmed polyester filler, which its use is again warned about in the Central States newsletter.  With those two data points now converged, it confirmed to me that the Metal Glaze must go… never to be used again! (ok, apparently it’s fine to use over PRIMER, but not before).

Thus, I removed it as you can see below.

My last build task of the evening was to slather up the elevators with micro [in 2 steps: bottom first → nearly cure → then top side]… which took a good half hour per side, so 2+ hours total.

Then even more sanding and re-microing shenanigans on & around the canopy frame… And more sanding and more micro applications coming tomorrow I’m sure (did I mention it’s an iterative process?!).

Pressing forward . . .