Sunday, June 7, 2009

Fiberglass - Center Section




Completed the center section today. After cutting all of the strips to size, mixed a batch of epoxy and coated the mating surface. After removing the excess epoxy from ply #1 I put it in place. It is 2 3/4" by 36" long. A helper would have been nice because handling the long, wet strip or the dry strips is sort of awkward. The problem with the long strips is the top and bottom edge wants to unravel as opposed to the sides where the pieces wanted to distort. You have to be even more careful when ply's #2 thru #10 are placed. They are positioned dry and then wetted out with a 1" brush. I learned very quickly what type of brush stroke would cause the edge to unravel. Was nice to have a pair of scissors to cut the strands that did unravel. There still were a bunch. The narrowest strip (1/4") was even more of a challenge. It wanted just to fall apart. Ended up with a very small valley between the top of the dash and the canopy which will have to filled with epoxy and micro balloons. Attached the peel ply and will remove it on Monday.

Time Today - 4 hours