I final knife cut & sanded out the main landing gear tabs.  Then I took the gear outside & mounted it to the fuselage… it fit! (Whew!)

I then measured the respective gear legs to the “nose” centerline mark.  One side was 0.2″ closer to the CL mark than the other … oh well, I’ll mitigate that when I mount the axles.

I tightened up the gear bolts & flipped the fuselage over so it was sitting on the gear.  It looked good!

I then hooked the battery up & tried out the landing brake in some what of a more “operational” setting!

And finally, before I put the fuselage away in storage, I played around with some urethane foam & cut/shaped a hellhole cover… kind of a pain.  But good experience.

After I put the fuselage away in its climate controlled storage facility (my dining room!), I did the final aligning, measuring & mounting of the wing jigs to the wing base… which was fairly time consuming to make sure the jigs were perfectly aligned, square, parallel, perpendicular . . . etc.

With the help of Gina & Kevin, I pulled out the Right wing cores, spread them on the portable workbench outside, and aligned them all together.

After duct-taping the foam edges to protect the foam as much as possible from stray wayward micro, we micro’d the core pieces together (FC1, FC2, FC3, FC5) and set them in the garage to fully cure.  I should point out that there are 5 major sections of  wing cores that make up the wing.  Starting at the rear of the wing, on the inboard side (nearest the fuselage) is where the counting starts.  The back half of the wing has 3 major sections:  FC1 (INBD), FC2 (Middle), and FC3 (OUTBD).  The front half of the wing only has two major sections, and it actually starts in the middle of the wing (since the strake makes up what constitutes the “Inboard” wing) and moves outboard.  The front major sections are FC4 (Middle) and FC5 (OUTBD).  Hopefully this will help put things in context whilst discussing wing core sections.

After the micro started setting up, I very carefully slid the first core segment into the wood wing jigs.  I set the front wing half core on top of the rear wing half as you can see in the pic above.  [This was just for testing the fit & picture purposes.  The front wing core was not micro’d to the rear wing core at this point].  Since the micro was drying, we removed all the tape before it became a permanent part of the wing makeup (micro is some tough stuff… especially with tape!).