10/04/2005 (1 hours):

Cut the notch where the canard will sit, and shaped about half the fuse. This went a lot faster than I expected.

10/05/2005 (1.5 hours):

Looks like I overestimated this step. Better than the other way around. The shaping actually went pretty quickly. I used a belt sander to shape the blue foam and longerons, since those would otherwise have taken a long time to sand by hand. I did the urethane with a hand sanding block, just an 11-in board with sandpaper on it. Quick work.

The only problem I had was with the fuel sight gauges. In Chapter 5, I messed up how these were supposed to be installed. I bought the lighted replacement sight gauges, which look great. However, their documentation was a little confusing to me, without being able to picture the strake. I just cut out the general opening and left it as-is for now. I'll fix/change this when it comes time to start building the strake, when it's obvious where the strake floor will be.

Finally, I cut a few foam plugs for holes left when the sides were removed from their forms. You can fill these with dry micro, instead, but the foam is lighter because only a little micro is used to hold the plugs in place. Once the project is done, nobody will ever know, but since I made some mistakes in various sections that have added weight, I decided it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to do some weight-removal things, too.