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Dan's Web Site
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Date: 8-17-2006
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Number of Hours: 6.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Fiberglass Side Rails and Corners to Fill Gaps
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I can't tell you how excited I am that I was able to pull the front corners in. When Matt finally arrived and looked things over he said the rest would be a piece of cake. And he was right.The first thing we did was use blue electrical tape and duct tape along the fuselage canopy deck and along the sides of the fuselage to create a non-bonding surface between the canopy and the fuselage. Then we sanded the sides of the canopy with 40 grit sandpaper, vacuumed and acetoned everything and applied 2 layers of fiberglass along the sides. Since the sides of the canopy were now bent inboard from the sides of the fuselage, the fiberglass took a zig. In other words it was vertically along the canopy, then jutted outward and horizontally along the fuselage canopy deck, then jutted downward vertically again along the side of the fuselage. This provided a nice shelf for a fair amount of micro filler to bring the sides of the canopy out flush with the sides of the fuselage. Then we applied another layer of fiberglass on top, which was flush from top to bottom. And, since you are really not supposed to put fiberglass over micro, the best part was that along the top of this sandwich, it was glass to glass. Likewise, along the bottom it was also glass to glass. Only in the middle and along this shelf did we have micro sandwiched in between the glass layers. The final step was to micro over the top layer of glass and then sand along the bottom down to the tape to get a nice perfect edge between the canopy and the fuselage. Voila!!! The sides of the canopy are flush with the sides of the fuselage and there are no gaps! Also, while applying the final micro, we transitioned the top goof that we had made earlier back to about the 5th screw on the side skirts. It will be very hard to tell that ever had a problem!
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Right side - no gaps
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Left Side - no gaps
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