Title: windshield fairing continued
Over the last few days I've continued to plug away at the windscreen fairing. I've also been working on the wheel pants. More on that in a separate entry. For the fairing- I mentioned in my last log entry that Keith Rea told me that his started about .10" thick aft the aft edge and he leaned on it and cracked it, necessitating a couple of more plies to fix it prior to paint. Based on that input, as well as the fact that I had a lump where the side skirts nested at the aft lower corners, I decided to make mine a bit thicker. First, I applied a skim coat of micro everywhere. In order to get a better transition from the sides to the lumps at the aft corners, the micro was squeegeed into shape with a rigid piece of aluminum, rather that my typical flexible bondo squeegee. In order to get the fwd radius right, I used a couple of different radius sanding blocks. The smaller radius in the center was accomplished by means of a sanding block simply made by wrapping a piece of 60 grit paper around stack of 3 rolls of 3m blue painters tape still in the cellophane wrapper. Specifically, this was about a 5" radius. This transitions to a shallower radius where the windshield base starts to wrap around the fuselage sides was accomplished by using the curved back side of a hard rubber sanding block that I happened to have. I don't know the exact radius, but looking around the shop for something that might work, I happened on it and it seemed about right. I'd guess that its probably about a 10" radius. I then applied another 2 layers of 7.5 oz Eglass, and another skim coat of extremely runny micro, just to give me something to sand without getting down into the glass. One that had dried, and the edged were trimmed and sanded down to final size, I once again block sanded everything to get the fairing into its 100% final shape. I then applied two coats of neat epoxy. Once that dries, I'll block sand one more time, then hopefully I'll be ready to slap a couple of coats of hi build primer on this and call it done.


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