Stjohn's RV-7

Remember how I said I wasn’t going to give you a play by play of all the iterations of goop? I lied. Here’s some pics of the process.

First round of sanding. This is just the black flox-resin buildup. I grabbed some stiff foam pipe insulation (redneck water noodle), a section about a foot long, from the hot water recirc pipe on the side of the house then wrapped it in sandpaper, which gave me a flexible sanding block with about the right radius for the fairing.

A few rounds after this point, I was ready for some glass.

Here are two of the strips of crowfoot laid out on the plastic, getting ready for wetting.

Yes, it is actually me building this thing.

The black electrician’s tape is the point at which I’d like to stop getting fiberglass goo all over the skin.   Forward of this,  I covered it with clear packing tape, which was a HUGE mistake, or at least it’s a huge mistake to use the cheap stuff.   I wound up picking most of it off with my fingernails in a time-consuming, arduous process that I’m not eager to repeat.   Word on the street is that the black vinyl tape plumbers and HVAC guys use (not duct tape) is perfect for this.  It also takes a couple of hits from sandpaper without turning into a scored mess.

Another shot of me.   Are you not entertained?

This time, I put the peel-ply on in little strips, which yielded much better results than trying to wrap long strips of dacron around that compound curve.

This shot, you saw in the last post.   This is after glass and before the next layer of flox, used to fill the divots.   After that layer, I switched to micro.   All of it tinted black.. Nasty stuff.

5 hours.
Another combination entry, since you all don’t need a play by play on the iterations of goop happening with this canopy fairing, but beginning 7/2 and ending today I’ve done the final shape of the radius, put down 4 layups of 8-oz crowfoot glass, and a fill/smoothing layer of black-tinted micro. Shelley’s real good with cloth, so she helped do the layups, which was a bonus since it took 2 of us to get a canopy-wide strip of wet glass on there. I used the plastic-sheet/squeegee method to prepreg the cloth and we laid them up wet. That stuff stretches like crazy when it’s wet, because the weight of the resin pulls at it, as well as having part of it stuck while you’re positioning something else.. But the magic sponge did its job.. I was able to get everything to lay flat and the edge came up to the electrical tape boundaries I’d made.

This is after the peel-ply came off and I hit it with some 60-grit. I”m not going to show you every iteration of sanding, because I use my iPhone for music in the shop and I don’t want to get it full of dust, but suffice it to say that there are many iterations of this. Right now, there’s a bunch of black micro hopefully slathered into all the low spots, and tomorrow morning I get to sand it all smooth. I hope this works.