Date:  12-09-2018

Number of Hours:  9

Manual Reference:  no ref

9/12/18 No plans ref and 9 hours work

Now the area is prepared I can go ahead with the pour foam.

I’ve just used cardboard and gaffa tape to make a dam. It seems overly big yet I need a bit of height against the winglet and  its easier to do it all in one go.

Yes its a mess and probably way too much.

This was after way too much work cutting down the foam.

The secret to making this happen quickly turned out to be 40 grit paper glued to a 2.5″ wide postal roll container. Anything the right O.D. would have worked. I really wanted a 2″ container but this is all that was around yesterday.

It did a nice job of roughing out the foam close to the radius I wanted.

Today I found a 2″ diameter cardboard postal tube with a nice poster inside. The poster is still in there, now with 40 grit sandpaper glued to the outside with spray contact adhesive.

You can see the curve at the end. After all my measuring the final numbers sort of took care of themselves. 

The fairing begins 7″ in from the leading edge. It ends with a bit over 2″ radius about .5″ up from the bottom of the rudder cutout. I made the radius constant from the trailing edge of the wing to the back of the rudder. The forward part just begins at the 7″ spot and grows to the full 2″ radius curve by the time it gets to that end of wing TE position. With the long ‘sanding stick roller’ it just sort of happens naturally.

I just slightly wetted out the foam area with some pure epoxy and then added micro, ending with a stiffer batch for the inevitable sink holes I seem to produce with pour foam. I did the usual wetting out on foil and plastic for the two ply of BID.

The foil techniques worked well as usual. It is quite a curve to get the glass around. I think I have too much really and will probably sand the edges well back after cure. I little filler is less weight than two ply of glass so I might loose an inch or so where its not needed.

Glass and peel ply done. I’ll clean up after the cure and then see how it goes to release the rudder. I’ll do the bottom half of the fairing also with a two inch radius. This will happen the next time I have the wings off and upside down.

This might be sooner rather than later.