After a coat of micro yesterday, today is just to add 2ply of BID to the canopy receiving shelf. Yes I thought I’d call it something. First up a pic of the turtleback that I omitted yesterday.

Below is how the foam looks after the peel ply is removed. Its still not a perfect surface and to get that it would be another round of micro and lots of sanding. I’m going to continue with this surface but I’m using another thin coat of micro after a wash of pure epoxy. Along with the BID tapes this should give a reasonable surface.

I found that I could just get the full tape length out of one cut from my big roll of glass but I’ve had to use the canopy box as the table. My usual glass working bench was not long enough and this was lying on the floor. So why not?

Here I’ve cut the two 2ply tapes out after wetting the glass and plastic top and bottom. These days I’m using scissors to cut ‘prepreg’ on foil. I did most of the build using a rotary cutter and a cutting board. The last six months or so I’ve moved to the scissors which is much easier in some respects for most of these smaller width layups.

After the epoxy and micro wipes I’ve set the tapes up on the prepared ledge. Yes it needed a little sanding at the start which I always like to do. Even if the surface seems prepared I believe this is still good practice.

After a lot of careful smoothing down I added the precut peel ply and slowly wetted that out with a hairdryer and a brush. I’m pretty careful here as that blue foam will just melt if it gets too hot.

The final item was to clamp some 1″ wide electrical conduit I bought yesterday for this job. You can see it in the foreground of the pic. I’ve first covered it in duct tape too. I’m being overly careful to ensure a ready good bond for this BID. I want it flat to the foam and no gaps. This is the bed for the canopy and that ledge is wide enough, but not so wide as to allow for errors. I hope for a good fit on the outside relative to the fuselage sides.