The micro finishing sword that is… ha!
Today was nearly all about getting the right strake top and leading edge slathered up in micro. I did take the ailerons outside and sand the bottom of those a good bit with the orbital sander as well as the outboard side of the rudders… I had to get to that micro knocked down some before it got too hard to work with. I still seriously need to sand the outboard side of the winglets, but keep getting distracted with laying down more micro while the days are warm.
But the very first thing I did this morning early was to spend a couple of hours cheese-grating the inboard right winglet and right wing top micro.
I then cleaned and prepped the right strake top and leading edge for micro, taping off the seam with the wing and also the top cowling, which I remounted for this task.
As I did on the wing, I laid in a narrow line of flocro on the edge of the right strake seam with the wing, to harden up the edge a bit for wing installation and removal ops.
I then spent the next few hours slathering up the right strake top and leading edge with micro.
I had a good bit of micro left over from my last batch, and not wanting to waste it I simply slathered up the fuselage forward of the strake, underneath the canard and a bit on the nose as well.
Here we have the right strake and some of the forward fuselage micro’d up. Obviously I still have the canopy in place, so I didn’t do all of the longerons or turtledeck… that will come later.
After all the micro was applied, I then went through and pulled the thick Gorilla duct tape from the strake-to-wing seam. I ran a razor knife down the seam to clean it up a bit, and will sand it clean when I remove the wing, but I do have a nice, narrow distinct seam line between the two.
And here’s my final parting shot of the evening, with the right winglet, wing and now strake all in micro.
Tomorrow I do plan on paying the piper in sanding the outboard winglets (and hopefully right wing as well), but do plan on prepping and getting the majority of the left strake top micro’d up as well… but no fuselage micro at this point on the left side since I need to do some canopy interface work on the forward longeron and fuselage.
Pressing forward with finishing!