I started out today by spending a couple hours at the airport with Guy Williams putting the new wing lift jacks to the test… which they passed splendidly. I do plan on modifying them with some type of positive stop to not rely solely on the bottle jack for keeping the wing/strake elevated, but that’s a minor issue.
Again, Guy is dealing with a warped main gear leg on the right side, almost certainly caused from braking heat damage. He’s assessing his options for repairing it.
Back in my shop, I started by knocking down the right winglet LE cured epoxy wipes with an 80 grit disc on the orbital sander.
I then used a long sanding board to sand down another round of micro/West 410 that I had added to the initial added fill to the right wing leading edge. I’ll note that the LE still isn’t laser straight, but it’s much, much straighter and will be very close to spot on straight once I add a few rounds of primer and sand those down.
With sanding complete, I epoxy wiped the right wing leading edge with 4 rounds.
Along with the right wing leading edge above, I also epoxy wiped the outboard right rudder… which I had sanded down some micro/West 410 (leftover from the wing LE added fill) that I added to this front lower corner on the outboard side of the right rudder. This very minor add results in this corner matching the surface level of the matching/interfacing corner of the winglet.
I’m also very happy to report that over the last few days I dialed in and finalized the sanding/shaping/contouring in and around the areas of the intersection of the winglet leading edge to the wing… on both left and right sides. Both of which were recently covered with black guide coat. I may have some very minor tweaking to do (not surprisingly) after primer is applied, but those areas are looking pretty darn good now.
In between epoxy wipes, I then got around to micro’ing up the top cowling. My main target here was the front outboard corners to allow me to integrate them with the strake micro fill surfaces. As you can see I also got the center backbone depression and top aft edge micro’d up as well. I still need to do add micro on the aft vertical areas and the undersides of the “trailing edges.”
In the same fashion as the right rudder above, I finished wet sanding the epoxy wiped added micro to the front lower outboard corner of the left rudder as well, before installing it back on the left winglet.
I then wet sanded both sides of the rudder across the seams onto the winglet as well, to get the surface levels as evenly matched as possible. Here we have the left rudder final install, micro finished, ready for primer and paint on the outboard side (pic 1) and the inboard side (pic 2). [Final configuration/install of the left winglet top video camera mount coming up soon]
Thankfully the last couple of days have been warmer and I haven’t needed to utilize the Kerosene torpedo heaters, but I wanted to note that I broke out my CO detector to ensure I wasn’t gassing myself with carbon monoxide in the shop by firing up those heaters. So far so good, and no sign of any CO. Honestly, I didn’t expect any because the consumption burn rate on Kerosene is reportedly very complete.
My biggest issue at the moment, and my final task of the evening (no pics), is the reinstallation and configuration of the left aileron back onto the left wing. In my constant rush to get stuff done, I believe that I allowed too much epoxy to fill in the aileron hinge screw holes in the wing during its epoxy wiping. I figured the surrounding/existing holes would simply allow me to redrill through the cured epoxy and thought nothing of it.
Well, apparently the cured epoxy caused some slight offsets during the redrilling of those hinge screw holes, because I haven’t been able to get the left aileron installed back into its pre-epoxy wipe position… and I’m having some clear squawking from the middle hinge with the aileron installed. Bottom line is it needs some tweaking and TLC to get back to good.
With that said, I’m still getting closer to paint every day… pressing forward!