Brief Description: rehearsing the movement of pre-pregged plies
I am continuing to agonize over exactly how big the fiberglass cloth plies need to be cut. I even cut down one of my bedsheet templates to see if I can get away with making them 6 inches shorter. I also spent some time trying to visualize how the cloth will drape around the metal edges I have marking the air inlet openings and crankshaft opening at the front of the cowl. I even took the sheet templates and the mold over to my daughter's house and rehearsed with her how we will move the fiberglass from the pre-pregging table and onto the mold. In order to get the diagonal overlaps to alternate the way I want them to, the first and last plies will have to remain horizontal but be rotated about 270 degrees as we move them from the table to the mold. But the middle ply will have to be flipped over. when we were laying up the first attempt over the plug mold, we did that flip wrong and had to do a lot of cutting and patching in a recovery attempt. I had myself convinced that I've done the best I can do on smoothing out the mold, and it is now time to accept the imperfections and move on with the layup. But my hangar neighbor came over and looked at my mold, told me I will regret it if I don't keep trying to get it smoother. He knows a lot about auto body and fender repair, and he told me of some different materials and techniques I should be using, and he loaned me a special sanding tool to get a better finish. So tomorrow morning I will be going to the body work supply shop he mentioned, buy some new materials and tools, and get back to mold refinement before I jump into the layup.
