With a clear blue sky, albeit much cooler than the last couple of days, I pulled the fuselage outside to finally sand down the main gear legs’ micro refill for what would be the final time before epoxy wiping them.

Here’s the fuselage outside along with the right wing.

To reiterate the woes of winter building, when I pointed my phone to take this shot it was 3:59 pm.  When I looked at my phone afterwards it had flipped to 4 pm on the spot.  That is the sun peeking through the trees on the side of my shop.  Clearly not a lot of usable daylight these winter months for building . . .

After about an hour’s worth of sanding I was happy with the results of the micro/West 410 refill.  Although I have a couple of spots that are suspect, I decided they’re not worth another refill until I see how they look after 4-5 coats of epoxy.

And I did do a number of touchups on my sanding job after I snapped these pics.

I also redriilled the holes in the wheel pant flanges for the screws and CAMLOCs.

I also countersunk the holes for the front 3 positions which are for CS #10 screws.

And here’s one last shot before I put the bird back inside the shop.

I then knocked out the first of 4 epoxy wipes.

On epoxy wipe #2 I sanded down the spot refills on the aft nose/avionics cover and hit those spots with another round of epoxy wipes.

Also in between epoxy wipes I cleaned up the hinges on the landing brake, both by removing the paint on the inside edges of each hinge tab and by clearing out the paint in the hinge pin holes.

I then drilled all the countersinks for the CS #10 screws with countersunk washers and installed the hinge screws.

As example of what the landing brake will look like when installed, I then set the landing brake actuator mounting screws in place.

I then prepped the RAM air scoop/hell hole hatch cover for mounting by drilling the countersinks in the holes.  I also redrilled the 4 CAMLOC holes as well to clear out the slight bit of excess paint.

It was past midnight when I finally finished epoxy wipe #4.

I don’t think a 5th epoxy wipe would add much, if any, value so I called it good at #4.

I’ll let the epoxy cure for a couple of days before sanding it down for primer.  Tomorrow I’ll focus on the last (hopefully) coat of the fuselage black accent stripe and some more blue paint antics.