I started off today by taking the left elevator outside the shop to wet sand it with 150 grit. I am happy to report that it is now ready for primer and paint.

Then, having made my decision to swap out the aft 4 CAMLOCs on each wheel pant apron with 10-32 screws and higher strength CAMLOCs, I took a little bit of time to drill out the rivets to remove the 2000 series CAMLOC receptacles from the aft wheel pants.

I then removed the top cowling and epoxy wiped the inside surface with 2 coats of Hi-temp resin (HTR-212).

I then spent a good hour prepping, organizing and cleaning up the shop to allow me to put the bird in the grazing position for the first time —with the wings and engine installed.

I installed the battery in the nose, hooked it up, and then put the bird in the grazing position, which I captured in the video below.

I then grabbed a number of pics of the bird in the grazing position.

I’ll note here that the nose is sitting on its rubber bumper.

I set up a fan behind the canard blowing towards the nose and out of the shop.  I then loaded up a 40 grit disc on my orbital sander to do the initial sanding of the nose micro, knocking down the major high spots.

Here’s a couple more shots of the initial sanding on the nose micro.

I then used my 36-grit sanding board to block sand the nose micro a good bit more.

A wider angle shot of the bird in the grazing position with the nose micro sanded.

And a final shot of the sanded nose with the bird in the grazing position.

Again, I ordered some 1/16″ thick foam rubber seal for the nose hatch door, and once that arrives I can install it and then finish the final sanding of the nose and nose hatch perimeter to ensure that seam is even, level and tight.  Tomorrow I also plan on filling the numerous divots in the micro that I missed on my initial nose micro’ing effort.

Today ended up being primarily about working on the wheel pants and a good bit on getting the nose hatch door to latch with the added micro.

That being said, I started off by wet sanding the right elevator, after which I discovered a couple of rough spots on the top trailing edge.  So I added small dollops of micro to those spots.

I then took the right aft wheel pant outside to knock down the upper and lower micro areas I applied yesterday with my orbital & pad sanders.  I then taped up the seam edge of the forward pant half and the gear leg attach apron before reinstalling the right aft wheel pant (pic 1).

I then whipped up some more micro and applied it to the middle area between the upper and lower micro areas on the inboard side… obviously the aft was a bit lower here as compared to the forward wheel pant (pic 2).

I also added a bunch more micro to both the front and aft halves of the right wheel pant on the outboard areas… slowly getting everything leveled out on these wheel pants.

On the left wheel pant, I removed the aft half, took it outside and knocked down the micro I had slathered up on it a few days ago.  I then remounted the aft left wheel pant and finalized the sanding by hand with it in place.  The front still needs a little bit more micro, which I’ll apply the next time mix some up.

I then unexpectedly spent about 2 hours assessing the fit of the nose hatch door into the newly micro’d top nose.  I did a deep dive on determining why my 1/8″ seal was not working, and ended removing all of it one segment at a time.

With no seal on I still wasn’t getting the nose hatch door setting in place well enough for me to get the lock to actually latch… now, it would appear to be closed and latched, but if I pulled on the edge with my fingernail or a flat blade, the hatch door would pop open. Not good.

I’ve noticed that as the latch grabs the catch on the door side, it very slightly pivots towards the right.  Clearly the only thing that changed with the nose hatch door configuration was the added micro to the nose.  So, based on my hypothesis, I very slowly started to sand around the perimeter edge of the micro, focusing on the right side and specifically the right aft corner.

After about half an hour of slowly removing more of the micro edge around the nose hatch door, I finally got it to latch.

I then started to slowly add in the 1/8″ thick seal around the inside edge, but it’s simply too thick.  So I called it a night, went inside the house and ordered the same edge seal, only 1/16″ thick.  It will arrive in the next 2-3 days.

Back on the wheel pants for just a bit: I’ve been pondering and finally made the decision to pull the four (4) 2000 series CAMLOCs off the aft of each gear leg wheel pant apron and replace those with screws on the outboard side, and 4000 series (standard) CAMLOCs on the inboard side.  Over the next week I’ll start removing the 2000 series CAMLOC receptacles and slowly swap those out.

Again, still pressing forward… slowly but surely!

Since I couldn’t get the nose hatch door to latch into place last night before microing up the majority of the nose, my goal today was to definitely finish the micro application job on the nose.

Thus, I pulled the tape that secured the very aft edge of the nose hatch door as close to fully closed as possible, and then spent another half an hour carefully cutting and sanding the micro away from the edge of the nose hatch door to allow it to open freely.

Once the nose hatch door opened freely I removed quite a bit of tape from the foam seal to see if I could then get the door to lock close.  It didn’t (So yes, I probably could have waited to free the door, which may have allowed me not to go “weighted”… ahem!).  To keep the door closed while I micro’d the previously taped swath on each side, I then added a couple of heavy weights onto the door to keep it pressed as firmly closed as possible.

I then whipped up some micro and slathered it into the unmicro’d swaths from the door securing tape from last night.

At this point I can officially declare that the nose is in fact micro’d up!  Now all that’s needed is a bunch more sanding. Yay!

While the newly added micro on the nose cured, I went ahead and knocked out a sideline task of epoxy wiping the inside surface of the bottom cowling.  I had wholly expected to apply 2-3 coats, but after applying the first epoxy wipe I called it good.

You see, the reason why I’m epoxy wiping the inside of the cowling is twofold:
1st, I want to be able to more easily clean up any oil or liquids that come in contact with the cowling, without them soaking into the weave of the carbon fiber.
2nd, I want a smoother surface to apply my heat shields to under the exhaust pipes.  And since I had to rebuild the back half of the cowling (where the exhaust pipes are located) AND I peel plied my layups, one epoxy wipe seemed to do the trick just fine.

I also expected to get to wet sanding the elevators with 150 grit sand paper, but after doing the initial dry sanding with 120 grit on both elevators (almost 1.5 hours) I had had enough of sanding so I’ll do the wet sanding tomorrow.  Moreover, I need to fill a couple slight divots on the left elevator, so I did that and left it to cure overnight.

Back on the nose, I sanded the intersection at the aft nose/avionics cover new front lip and the aft area of the micro’d nose.  I also used my razor knife to carefully cut along the front of the aft nose cover front lip to free it from the nose micro.

I then pulled all the tape off the front lip of the aft nose cover.  Here it is open, with a shot from the aft side of the new micro lip on the nose.

And here’s a shot of the same from the front side.  I’ll note that there is just enough clearance for the front nose hatch door to be opened while the aft nose cover is fully opened.

With the tape off the front lip of the aft nose cover, I then snapped it back down into the closed position and grabbed a shot of the intersection between it and the new nose micro.

And of course we need a shot of the newly micro’d nose, which obviously needs to be sanded to a “pleasing’ shape at this point.

And one final shot of the freshly micro’d nose with the nose hatch door open.  Note the green tape which I used as my template, and is currently attached to the nose hatch door perimeter foam gap seal.

As I mentioned before, with the significantly less amount of tape remaining on the door seal (after I removed the duct tape and blue painters tape) it is still NOT latching closed.  The 1/8″ thick seal all around the entire perimeter is not allowing the door to close and latch… so I’m pulling the trigger on the same seal, only 1/16″ thick.  I’m thinking the front edge, front corners and aft middle segments will be 1/16″ thick, while the sides and aft corners will be the 1/8″ seal.  We’ll see and assess further in few days.

It was getting late, so I called it a night.  I’ll continue on with my micro finishing shenanigans tomorrow.

Well, today I definitely paid off my missed build time during my Long-EZ flying shenanigans yesterday with Guy.

I started off by fine-tuning the sanding of the added micro just forward of and at the junction with the top cowl front lip.  Again, at the 10 O ‘clock position on the left side (pic 1) and at the 2 O ‘clock position on the right side (pic 2).

I also final sanded the area around the top cowl top center CAMLOC where it meets up with the aft edge of the turtledeck.

With all this latest work on the turtledeck, I’m happy to report that the perimeter areas around the canopy edges (minus the aft nose/avionics cover) are complete!

Although way down on my list of to-do tasks, I wanted to get a layup or two knocked out today to trim down that list.  As I did on the left wheel pant, the aft side of the right wheel pant has 3 spots that are significantly lower than the front pant edge: those being one on the top (same as left side) and then inboard top and inboard bottom corner… this last one being the most significant of all of them.

I had already marked these low spots months ago to ID where the stepped plies of BID needed to be added.  I made templates of each set of layups and then cut the BID and peel ply before getting to work laying them all up.

I had a bit of epoxy remaining in my cup when I finished with the layups above, so I pulled out my Hertzler Silver Bullet prop.  It has some slight edge delams going on, mainly near the prop hub, so I filled those with epoxy, peel plied the corner edge and then taped them tightly closed to cure.  Yet another task off my list.

After aggressively sanding the bottom leading edge of both strakes, I then slathered them up with a good bit of micro.  I had applied micro before to fill this leading edge area, but the overall transition contour from bottom strake to leading edge was not uniformly smooth, thus the new round of micro on the left strake bottom LE (pic 1) and the right as well (pic 2).

My last task of the evening was the big one.  I taped up the front edge of the aft nose/ avionics cover before securing it into place.  I then sanded the raw glass and transition edges of the pre-existing micro fill on the nose.

For the nose hatch door I spent about 45 minutes taping up the edge flange of the door with green painters tape, ensuring I got both the inside edge and perimeter edge exact as possible.

I then made an angle cut in each of the 4 corners of the green tape edge strips to be able to pull off the 4 tape templates (left, right, front, aft) to then use them to cut the 1/8″ foam rubber seal.

I then taped the seal segments in place on the inside flange of the nose hatch door (I don’t want to apply them yet until after I paint the nose hatch door exterior), finishing off with a strip of duct tape as a gap for the perimeter edge of the nose hatch door.

Now, the issue with using the multiple plies of tape to both secure the seal to the door and protect the seal from the micro, is that it made it all a little too thick to actual get the door to latch close.  So I simply used tape around aft edge of the door to secure the door closed.

I then slathered up the nose with thick micro.

Here’s some side shots of nose slathered up with micro.  I then left it to cure overnight.

Tomorrow I’ll remove the nose hatch door securing tape and micro those areas, as well as press forward with other finishing tasks.

Moving ahead!

I started off today already a little behind the power curve build-wise since I had to run downtown to knock out a couple of errands.  While downtown I stopped by one of my favorite coffee joints for a cup of java while I planned my day out.

Back home, I put the finishing touches on the latest blog post and uploaded that.  I had just finished printing out the day’s shop task list when I got a call from Guy William’s (local canardian), asking me if I wanted to go flying?  Are you kidding me?!  As much as I want to get my bird in the air, I figure it would be good to get a motivational hop in his Long-EZ (classic rationalization), given that I’ve done my fair share of work on it over the past number of months.

I got to Guy’s hangar at the airport about 45 minutes later, where he already had his Long-EZ pulled out and pre-flighted.  I hopped in, buckled up and grabbed this pic just prior to us firing up and taxiing out for the flight.

I’ll note that today was just about a perfect flying day.  We took off and immediately could see North Carolina’s beautiful Chrystal Coast (Outer Banks) all around us.

Once leveled out, we could see the airport down below (KMRH) that we just departed.

We headed toward the lighthouse on Point Lookout and after a few tight turns over the Atlantic coastline, I took over flying and went out just a bit beyond the point out over the Atlantic before turning back around and flying up the beach a bit.

We did a few more turns, and since Guy has a rear seat throttle, we even did a number of stalls, which is a first for me in the Long-EZ.

Overall, a super great experience and a lot of fun! (Thanks Guy!!!) and more importantly, all the work we did on his plane proved to be up to the challenge of real world ops.

Of course no good deed (or goofing off flying!) goes unpunished, so why should today be any different??  On the way home from the airport I discovered a giant screw in my right front tire.  The good news is I was just a couple of miles from where I bought the tires, and since I have an anything goes warranty, I pulled in and had them fix it.  The bad news is that it took another good 1.5 hour more chunk out of my day.

Ok, back in the shop I did a bit of sanding on the low spot fills I did on the D-deck left side 10 O’ clock position where it met the top cowling (pic 1), and the same for the right side at the 2 O ‘clock position (pic 2).  I also initially sanded the top cowl front edge centerline where it met the D-deck.  It was getting later in the evening so I punted the final sanding until tomorrow as to not screw anything up.

I also did the final prep on the elevator BOTTOM surfaces before doing a final epoxy wipe on each one of those.  The next step is to wet sand these epoxy-wiped elevators, at which point they’ll be ready for primer.

Although I haven’t shown it, over the past week whenever I’ve had a bit of extra epoxy in my cup, I’ve been adding a couple of stepped plies of BID at a time (4 plies total) to fill in a low spot on the aft left wheel pant where it meets the front pant… about even with the micro on the front pant seam and in a curve aft towards the gear leg pant apron.  For whatever reason I had a really low spot here, so I filled it with a bit of glass before adding a layer of micro.  I added glass since I wanted to minimize any cracking of what would have been a fairly thick layer of micro.

I double checked the thickness of my added BID plies, and then remounted the aft pant half and after taping up the intersecting edges of the gear leg apron and the front pant half, I slathered on a good layer of micro.  I also hit the top forward area of the front wheel pant as well since there was a slight depression down the centerline.

Of course I didn’t get nearly what I had planned to done in the shop, but I did get a little bit knocked out.  And a day out flying is always good stuff!

My goal today was to no-kidding finalize the integration of the aft canopy into the longeron, shoulder corner and D-deck.  I have some very strange contours going on here, and thought I had it a couple of days ago, but just above the corner canopy curve on each side I had about a 2.5″ strip where the canopy lip was much prouder (by about 0.1″) than the D-deck surface… so I added micro to those areas.

Today I started by actually removing the top cowling, sanding the aft perimeter edge/lip of the D-deck, shoulders and strake, as well as cleaned up the front CAMLOC/screw flange of the top cowling.  I then remounted the top cowling with all its hardware for this final sanding, which I spent nearly 2 hours doing.

All looked good except a low spot on the D-deck in comparison to the top cowl front lip, at about the left 10 O’ clock position, and mirrored at the 2 O’ clock position on the right.  I guess I should feel good that my refills are proving to be symmetrical on both the left and right sides (some building humor there!).

I did have one more problem area and that was the top center of the top cowling, about an inch to either side… this edge is low compare to the D-deck, and the D-deck profile looks good to me.  So I added a bit more micro at this spot on the top cowl and will blend it in to match the D-deck.

When I added micro to the D-deck vs canopy lip low spots yesterday, I also hit a couple of divots on the added front edge lip of the aft nose/avionics cover.  Well, I sanded that down as well today, and I think I’m looking pretty good on this new, added front lip.  This is in an effort to get the front nose micro’d up . . .

Speaking of micro finishing the front nose: a big issue is the recent addition of the latch internal spring plunger —that is critical for the nose hatch latch to operate as designed— is pushing up on the inside of the nose hatch door.  My original 1/32″ rubber seal is definitely not the right thickness for the job (if it ever was… I never did a final test on it).  A few days ago I ordered some 2″ wide 1/8″ foam sealant (note roll top left corner of pic), which just arrived, and I cut off 4 squares to do an initial check on the nose door sealing.

I have to say it looks very promising.  I’ll add some more squares including centerline front and aft tomorrow to assess further.  If this seal is the one, I should be slathering up the nose within the next few days and finalizing the micro finish on that area.

My final task of the evening, which also took a decent little bit of time, was sanding down all the filled divots and larger pin holes on the top surfaces of the elevators.  I then finished the job with a very thin epoxy wipe on each elevator top.

Tomorrow I’ll wet sand the top surfaces, and then epoxy wipe the bottom surface of each elevator.

A big note on this airplane build: Since it’s the middle of April, and Jess and are getting married the end of May, from here on out until the wedding I’ll be limiting myself to about 3 hours a day on the build. Clearly I think I’ll continue to make significant progress as well, but I need to get a bunch done on the house as I have wedding visitors coming in during the last week of May.

Still, pressing forward.

Although I did some sanding and touch-up micro on the aft nose cover, around the D-deck/longerons and on the elevators, my main push today was to finish off the install of the canopy latch external lock, by filling in the area around the lock assembly internal to the wall.

With the micro fill aft of the lock assembly good, I then made up a dam/form made out of clear plastic to protect the pivoting lock catch on the inboard side, as well as the slot inside the sidewall that the lock catch pivots into when unlocked.

I then mixed up and added some pour foam in this little pocket and let it cure.

I thought it was a bit more cured than it was when I went to remove the big blob of exuding foam, and drug some of the foam from inside the wall that I was trying to fill. No big deal, so I cleaned it up a bit and added a layer of micro (about 0.2″) on top of the foam and filled any voids too.  Here’s how that looked.

The plastic dam had a bit of springiness to it, and wanted to come off the outboard face of the pivoting lock catch, so I pinned them together with a Cleco clamp, just as I did when I added the pour foam.

A few hours later, when the micro had pretty much cured.  I sanded it down and cleaned up the internal area of the lock, mainly around the pivoting lock latch.  It took a little bit of digging and a few iterations to clean it all up and ensure the lock had freedom of movement in its lock/unlock positions.

I’ve been planning on making a video on my completed canopy latch, and I did just that for the last few hours of this late evening.

Pressing forward!

Today was all about finishing up the canopy external lock install.  Clearly I hacked my way through the physical install of the lock into the fuselage sidewall yesterday, so today was all about getting a slot cut in the CORRECT spot on the bottom surface of the canopy latch handle which is of course what the lock latch is rotating up into to make a physical block from opening the handle.

I used the two 3D printed handles that I’ve been using for years in the canopy handle assembly as test subjects to get the exact position of the canopy external lock interfacing slot in the handle dialed in.

Once I was confident of the required lock latch slot position on the canopy handle, I just need to load up those numbers into my Fusion 360 CAM, post process and get to machining it… right?  Yeah, well, I had niggling issues galore that turned a 30 minute task into a 2+ hour long task in figuring out some very frustrating idiosyncrasies of Fusion 360 in trying to do a 3-tool machining job.  But I powered through and finally came out victorious… yay.

My first task on the mill was to simply clear out some of the material, especially since the 1/8″ end mill that I had planned to use on this 1/8″ wide (or high…) slot was causing all kinds of angst in Fusion 360.  Using a 1/16″ end mill made all the errors and warnings go away inside the CAM program, but I didn’t want to stress this diminutive end mill too much.  Thus the row of 0.118″ diameter clearance holes, prepped for drilling with a center drill (pic 1), then the actually drilling (pic 2).

I then used the 1/16″ end mill to clean out the slot… the whole machining of the slot taking less than 10% of the time to program it all! (sigh)

And here we have the slot.  I did angle the forward (left) end with the Dremel to allow clearance of the incoming and exiting lock latch as it pivots into/out of the slot.

With a number of test runs on the actual canopy handle, installed in place, which did require a minute amount of judicious filing, I was happy with the combined, integrated fit and operation of the lock and handle together.  I removed the handle assemble and created a taped up stir stick dam to contain micro to fill in the aft area that I had opened up in the side wall to mount the canopy external lock.

I then whipped up the micro, filled the aft area and finished off this task with a small piece of peel ply to smooth out the top.

I thought I’d grab a shot of the hole that I made on the inboard sidewall to first allow for using my hex key to install the washers and screw to secure the pivoting latch plate to the lock barrel.  Since I can see it in this pic, I’ll also note that I removed about 0.05″ of the top of the latch plate to flatten it and keep it from travelling too far up into the handle and digging into the forward pivot rod.

Back to the screw… if I had planned well enough ahead, I would have simply drilled out this hole in the inside sidewall wide enough to allow full insertion of the screw.  As it was though, I had literally ground down a good 0.035″ of the head of the screw in my attempt to get enough clearance.  I also used a razor knife to make the hole in the sidewall a big enough diameter to allow the screw to not be pushing on the sidewall AFTER the lock was installed.  My point here is that I made two things ugly (screw and hole) by trying to install this the “right” way… good deeds never go unpunished!

Besides slathering up the front edge of the aft nose cover with micro, I failed to mention (as I often do) that I did a small 3-ply stepped layup on the front face of the left inboard elevator fairing to close up a gap between it and the canard trailing edge (lower right corner of pic).  I then micro’d that when I micro’d the cover’s front edge.  Well, I sanded that front face micro down before installing the cover, and although I don’t have a comparative “before” pic, you can clearly see that the gap is minimal.

Tomorrow I’ll finish filling in the cleared out inside sidewall for the canopy external lock install and then move onto finishing the nose, etc.

I started off today by trimming the newly glassed front edge lip on the aft nose/avionics cover.  I then remounted the cover to assess its fit on with the nose and the canard.

I found that I then needed to do a small layup on the front left corner tab to extend it just a hair more to fill a gap where it marries up with the canard leading edge.  I added a single patch of BID on the inside and also on the outside, respectively, with a very small dab of flox to fill the small edge gap of the new lip.  I then peel plied both sides of this layup.

As this layup cured, I got to work on installing the canopy latch external key lock (below), but to stay on topic I’ll jump ahead a few hours and show the new glassed front lip on the aft nose/avionics cover with it re-micro’d, in prep for final surface finishing.

Now, the installation of the canopy latch key lock was an adventure in and of itself, which I wholeheartedly expected it to be.  The 2 main issues were 1) the depth (too much) of the lock barrel with the pivoting latch plate installed (mainly the securing washers + screw head) and 2) getting the pivoting latch plate installed which had to occur AFTER the large ~1″ diameter lock assembly securing nut was threaded onto the barrel.

To gain a bit more depth clearance, I thinned down the pivoting latch plate from about 0.085″ thick to half that thickness where it got secured to the end of the lock barrel.  This gave me just a skooch more room depth-wise, but I was still not able to mount the external lock assembly fully flat against the outside surface of the sidewall in my one of many, many trial installs.

I ended up drilling a small hole on the cockpit side to allow me to get a small hex wrench through to allow me to attach the pivoting latch plate AFTER the big lock securing nut was threaded on just enough where it was ready to be fully installed after the pivoting latch plate, washer, star washer and screw were all in place.  After I did finally get everything together and installed, the screw head was pressing against the inboard sidewall a hair more than I wanted.  So I loaded up a new blade in a razor knife and simply cut around the screw edge to allow it to protrude through the interior sidewall.  This provided the relief necessary for the inboard wall to return to its original position.

I’ll also note that I used blue Locktite on all threads as I installed this lock.

So…. after a few hours of false starts and changing up my install plan a few times, I finally got it!

Here’s a short video showing the basic operation of the canopy latch external key lock:

Tomorrow I’ll finish cleaning up the install with some judicious application of pour foam and micro going inside the sidewall around the key lock barrel and pivoting latch plate.  I also plan on working the interfacing slot on the handle that the latch plate will pivot up into to keep the canopy latch handle from being pushed inward… to prevent opening the canopy.  That, and more work to get the nose finished in micro.

Pressing forward, step by step.

Another 2-day update here.

I started out by doing the final trimming (Fein saw) and sanding of the instrument panel leg hole reinforcement flanges and wire troughs.  As you can see, I also drilled a hole in each one to allow for a wire-securing zip tie.

Here’s a front side view (you can see I’m getting close to finishing the nose hatch latch pull handle safety guard as well).

I’ve been scratching my head the last few days to finalize the solution of the issue where the front flange of the aft nose cover scrapes the aft top corner edge of the nose as the cover is opened and closed.  Clearly if I left it as is and continued on to paint, the paint on the top aft edge of the nose would be worn away in a few weeks.  I had to remove this clearance issue either through repositioning the front flange of the nose cover (further aft), or knocking down the edge of the aft nose corner.  But both of those solutions had pros and cons and helped create other issues of sorts.

Moving the nose cover flange aft appeared the best solution on the surface, but the geometry of the CAMLOCs is already set and it would have been a fairly in-depth and lengthy modification.  Radiusing the aft top edge of the nose would be fairly easy, but then I would have a distinctly curved edge at the seam between nose and cover.

What to do?  How about a little of both, with an added lip on the front edge of the nose cover to hide the overtly radiused edge?

I started by aggressively sanding the nose top aft edge (pic 1), for a good 5 rounds, mounting the aft nose cover and checking the clearance between the nose corner edge and nose cover flange before each round of sanding.  Here we have the final sanded corner edge (pic 2).

I also did a few iterations of skimming some surface material off the front flange face of the aft nose cover.  Here I have it marked for trimming (pic 1), and after I used the Dremel tool to reduce the surface, at which point I sanded it aggressively with 36 grit sandpaper (pic 2).

I also spent another hour knocking down the latest micro addition to the aft lower corner interfaces with the canopy, and around the turtledeck.  Although I still need to do the very final sanding with the top cowl in place, I went ahead and cut the excess fuel tank vent tubing off each side.  I have to say I’m very pleased with the outcome.

It was very late at night, and I was getting ready to close up shop for the evening when I started thinking about the top side paint scheme.  I grabbed some electrical tape and ran it down the side to simulate the top black stripe.  Above/inside that will be all blue.  I think it will look perfectly acceptable!

The front right corner of the aft nose cover was flared out a bit too much and need to be brought in closer to the nose, just forward of the right canard leading edge, at it’s root. I cut the inside of the nose cover with 3 grooves using the Fein saw, to allow me to curve the corner inwards.  I then put flox in the grooves and laid up a small 2-ply patch of BID over it before setting the cover back into place on the nose.  I then duct taped the corner to suck it inward to position while it cured.

Here’s another shot of that… I used the screw driver as a spacer to push inboard a bit more.  Also note the micro along the front edge of the aft nose cover has been sanded off.

Yep, I sanded down the aft “wings” of the aft nose cover to have them better align with the surface of the sidewall in the area under the front canopy lip.  While cleaning up the aft nose cover, I also sanded the micro away to get back down glass to allow me to add a lip to the front edge of the nose cover.  This will allow me to hide the aggressively rounded top aft corner edge of the nose, and create a tight seam betwixt nose cover and nose.

After taping up the round nose corner edge, I laid up 1 ply BID on the underside of the aft nose cover existing lip and peel plied it.  I then mounted the aft nose cover on the bird and installed all the hardware.  After filling in the small gap with micro along the front edge, I then laid up 2 plies of BID across the front edge of the nose cover, over the original single ply of BID from before (pic 1).  This gives me a 3 ply added lip, which will have micro over it… I think this should be plenty strong for an added 0.3″ wide lip.

After it cured, I removed all the tape and peel ply, and then marked the new front lip for trimming (pic 2).

Starting tomorrow I plan on working the final fit of the nose hatch door and start preparing for micro finishing the nose.  I also plan on doing the very final sanding and touchups on the D-deck, longerons and lower aft canopy corner interfaces.