Title: Top Bolt Access Hole and reinforcement lay up
In the previous post I cut and glassed the lower mounting bolt hole while the wing was upside down. Here I flipped the wing upright, measured, cut, trimmed, and glassed the upper mount hole. Then did the reinforcing lay up from the top to the bottom. I made one goof here in that the strips of UNI were supposed to be 3" wide and I accidentally did 4" wide. No major issue, but it was a mistake I could have avoided by re-reading the manual. Glad it was not a major component. One pic shows the BID wet out on an old transparency from my screen printing business. It is a good way to recycle the old films. I drew the avocado shape of the bottom of the mount hole for that piece, and then wet out a strip for the sides. The stiff film allows easy cutting to rough shape off the wet glass. The pic with the blue tape is the small piece of Triax you have to add the leading edge where the top and bottom don't meet during skinning. In this case I wet out a scrap piece of triax on a small piece of transparency film, wet the area I was applying it to, and wrapped it around and tapped it. The next morning the tape and film peeled right off and the patch perfectly matched the curve of the leading edge. The pic with the small squeeze bottle is my attempt and fixing a small mistake when skinning the top of the wing. The book says to wrap plastic over the top and down the front of the spar to hold the triax down while the epoxy cures. It doesn't like to bend that tight and will spring back. Well, I forgot the plastic and the top edge of the triax popped away from the spar in a few places along the leading edge of the spar. The top is fully secure so I don't see a safety issue but there is a small air gap in those spots. So slowly I drilled some small holes into the glass BUT NOT THE SPAR. You could feel the bit go through the glass into the air gap before hitting the spar. I had some small squeeze bottles with a syringe tip that I filled with epoxy and put in these holes one at a time. The clamps kept pressure on the bottle to slowly squeeze the epoxy into the air gaps and fill them. Now when I sand that area smooth and level I won't sand into air gaps. You can see the lighter areas of glass where the air gap is and the dark epoxy creeping into the void. I reached a milestone here, because this wing is now ready to be set aside, and the other wing moved into place for skinning. I believe it will go faster. My goal is to have it to this stage before the end of January.


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