Today I focused all on micro finishing on this bird, primarily the Big 3 areas that I have in my sights to finish up: the strakes’ lower leading edges, the wheel pants and the nose.

After these 3 are ready for primer and paint, that only leaves some fine tuning on the canard and the complete start-to-finish micro finishing on the outboard 3′-ish underside of each wing and inboard bottom winglet to complete ALL the micro finishing on this bird (not counting my baggage pods, which my buddy Shane Banquer currently has in his possession to make molds in his quest to make carbon fiber pods).

While I had the right wheel pant all buttoned up in my checking the mounting apron’s new aft outboard 10-32 countersunk screws (vs series 2000 CAMLOCs), I finalized the judicious sanding of the front/aft seams on the top, inboard and outboard surfaces.  With that sanding complete, the aft wheel pant was ready for primer and paint, with only a pair of series 4000 CAMLOC receptacles on the inboard aft apron flange (see below) to completely finish off the install.

The same followed suite on the left side wheel pant as well.

What I hadn’t accomplished yet on the front of each wheel pant “half,” since they’ve both been installed this whole time, is the micro’ing of the bottom center area just forward of the wheel.  I accomplished this by removing the wheel pant front halves, taking them outside and aggressively sanding them before slathering them up with a final (hopefully) round of micro.

I had already sanded the STRAKE lower leading edges from the last round of micro adds, and all looked good except for one small trough a few inches each side of the fuel check valve on the left side, and a rather significant single divot on the right side.  I waited to fill these areas with micro until I whipped some up for the front wheel pant “halves” above.

As for the aft wheel pants, although still in need of a pair of CAMLOC receptacles for each side, I went ahead and epoxy wiped them with 2 coats of West epoxy.

Earlier in the day I did a near complete final sanding of the top nose micro, with the only strip left to do being the immediate perimeter around the nose hatch door.

My last build act of the evening was to transfer my green tape internal perimeter nose hatch door seal templates to the 1/16″ foam rubber seal that was just delivered yesterday.  Unlike on the 1/8″ seal, this time around I actual peeled off the backing to expose the adhesive side and installed the seal (yes, pre-testing… my educated guess was that it’d work!).

I then mounted the nose hatch door, closed it with the lock latch holding firm, and then popped it open again.  And I tried this a few times to confirm its functional operation. Voila… success!

I’ll note that I’m leaving the green template tape in place until after I paint the external face of the nose hatch door.

I then spent a good 45 minutes sanding the nose hatch perimeter edge down to match the level of the closed/secured nose hatch door… and re-blended the lowered edge with the surrounding nose micro.

I still have to clean up the internal edge walls of the nose hatch door lip on the nose side, as well as pretty much the same with the interfacing nose-side lip with the aft nose/avionics cover.  Once those lip edges are clean and gaps are good I’ll be ready to epoxy wipe the nose micro.