I didn’t get much done yesterday with it being Thanksgiving… although I did get a bit of sanding in.

Today I actually started off with about an hour and a half of sanding on the fuselage paint, before taking a break outside to sand the cured epoxy wipes on the canopy frame. Overall I spent about 3 hours sanding down the epoxy surface on the canopy frame.

Here is the result.

And the other side.

I then whipped up some white primer and thickened it a bit with micro.  I’m adding another coat of primer (3 minimum) into the mix to ensure a better finish before paint from here on out.

That being said, I was just a bit shy on the amount of primer that would have been optimum to finish the first coat, but I was able to squeeze out the minimum on this first round and get ‘er done.

I then got back to the fuselage where I spent another good hour wet sanding it, after which I then mixed even more white primer and applied it to the low spots for what I call “freckles”… which are speckled areas typically smaller in size than a quarter that are showing low bits as compared to the surface of the good paint.

I’d say just under half the white you see is from actually sanding through the top blue paint to the underlying surface, where the other mottled splotches of white are from primer filing the speckled areas.

After a good 4+ hours of cure, I went ahead and filled a good number of spots on the canopy frame with West 410.  These areas are really quite small so I’m not overly concerned with heat generated from what will be the blue painted topcoat.

Here’s another shot of the West 410 refills on the other side of the canopy frame.

Cheating just a bit and doing these refills now will allow me to sand them down and roll right into the next round of primer fairly early on tomorrow.

And with that, I called it a night to let all this stuff cure.  I’ll keep churning on the fuselage paint to enable me to get this bird flipped back upright ASAP.