Today was floxing on the right bottom strake skin and adding boarder tapes. A big day.

I started off with more fitting of the skin. It needed a bit more off the very front baffle for the skin to get pretty close to matching the outboard end rib which in a perfect world will match my wing. Then I thought it would be an idea to have a rough template of where the ribs are. I’ll make four of these as I go. Perhaps if some time in the misty distant future I need to know rib placement for a repair, I’ll have these with the planes documentation.

Next was priming the joining surfaces which is a way of saying I bushed pure epoxy on both the skin and the rib framework it sits on.

Then it got a little ugly where I mixed way more flox that I should and put plenty on the top skin.

Next up was more flox on the rib and baffles, lots more. My idea here is I’m happy to waste a little and clean off the excess rather than have any areas starved of flox.

The top or rather bottom skin then went on as I had practiced and I weighted it down for the cure. It’s not going anywhere.

I’d previously worked out what length boarder tapes were needed. What I mean is that I wanted to tape the outer edges and do the flox skin on top thing in the one cure cycle. I really don’t want this thing to leak. So I made two ply 2.5″ wide BID tapes that go on all the outside boarders. That’s all the places a leak is possible. There are lots of inside tapes too but I’ll do those when the plane is right side up again. Its pretty challenging on your back adding flox and then tapes. My neck got a good workout.

In these shots you might see how I have tapes on the outer edges but not the internal yet. The tape is the shinny bit at the top of the pic. I just wiped the excess flox off those in between ribs and baffles, its the outside tapes that will do the work of sealing the tank. There were 10 of them and this part took some hours. I was careful using 2.5″ width rather than three inch I used previously for the hat tops. Three inches gives more error margin but its unnecessary weight so I made an effort this time. <grin>