Sunday, August 17, 2008

Melting the ski jump


If you've been following along with the progress of canopy windscreen fairing, you know I've been bothered by the "ski jump" on one side. It's a bump where the plexi meets the aluminum and where I also have a "clip" installed.

Here's what it looked like when I took the peel ply off this morning. You can still see a little bit of it there, and compare it to yesterday's entry.

I took Pete Howell's advice and mixed up some epoxy with microballoons -- I mixed it fairly dry and squeegeed it on.


Better. I went out to the hangar this morning so that I could get this done in the comparatively cool weather. It's supposed to get up near 90 this afternoon and I didn't want to be working with fiberglass in that kind of heat. So I'll let this cure for a day and then tomorrow after work I'll sand it and then put another layer of fiberglass over it. After that, I'll probably do one more layer and then try to figure out how I want to "radius" the thing.

Somewhat problematic are the sides where the canopy goes back under the side skirts. At the moment it looks like the scene of a crime.


I still can't imagine how people use one long piece of fiberglass fabric on this windscreen. I'm not sure how they get it so it doesn't bunch up on the inside curve. I'll worry about it later, I guess. I've got all winter to sand.

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