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Last Modified February 8th 2001
1st January Continued working on the doors. I speckle coated the doors in a darker colour to give some contrast inside the plane. Areas that are to have covers bonded on later were masked prior to painting.
I also speckle painted the covers though I should have waited as later in the day a trial fit of the door showed that the lower section of the mid door cover conflicted with the flange and therefore needed a bit of 're engineering' - and subsequent re painting.
2nd January Tidied up the inside of the plane a bit and clamped the starboard side cables to the firewall with adel clamps
3rd
January Top coat sanding for most of the day. I bonded the door hinges to
the door with redux and filled the top counter bores with redux/flox. The front
and back bolts have to be trimmed down before doing this as they sit pround of
the aircraft if you don't! Removing two turns of thread is sufficient to get
these below the surface.
4th January Top coat sanding - at least until I wore a hole in my middle finger!
Most of the sanding is being done with the palm sander. The picture on the left shows what the plane looks like halfway through the task. The grey surface is from the 3M dry coat marker which eventually gets removed as you sand down to the surface. Even the tiniest blemish shows up with this so once the power sanding was complete I took to the plane with a piece of sandpaper in my hand - hence the worn out finger.
I had a couple of spots where a repaint was required so I grabbed my hobby airbrush and touched those areas up. The hobby brush comes in really handy for this sort of thing and I'd add it to my list of essential tools.
With
the door frame area now complete other than a bit of polish I fitted the door
rubber. The joint is positioned at the top rear angle with the outer bead being
mitred to a nice join.
I fitted the starboard door to the aircraft only to discover that I hadn't allowed for the paint thickness on the top lip and promptly chipped the paint when I opened the door again. At least I can fix this up easily having painted the aircraft myself - things would be different if the plane had been painted professionally!
Decided to sulk for the rest of the day. .... ;-)
5th - 9th January All is not well in painter land! Rather than work on the door problem I decided to finish off the cutting back. Just aft of the fuel inlet my fuselage molding had a slight bump and I succeeded in cutting through the paint in that spot. Easy to fix thinks I and happily applies another could of coats of paint in the local area. All is fine until I come to cut it back again a couple of days later and discover a tide mark around the newly painted area. Much sulking. Tried to patch it up again and in the process discovered an interesting feature of top gloss when applied with a roller. If you roll until the paint is just about dry on the surface then you end up with a very smooth and gloss finish - as good in fact as if it had been sprayed. As a result I am now going to finish the cutting back, ignore the tide marks and then apply two more coats of heavily rolled paint. The masking over the fuel filler cap is giving me a good indication of how much top coat paint is actually staying on the aircraft and currently all that I have applied comes out to much less than the thickness of a piece of plastic cling film so I am not too concerned about the weight buildup of applying a couple more very tin coats.
10th January Did some more work on the instrument panel. Little bits of wiring and working out a clean way of bringing the cables up through the sides.
11th - 12th January No building, getting ready to go away.
13th - 23rd January No building, working in Dubai, UAE. It made a change from sanding! Best bit of the trip was walking into meeting, introducing myself and being told that most of the people there already knew me because they read my builders log - it's quite a buzz when that sort of thing happens.
24th -25th January Catching up on all the bits of work that Carol had found me to do whileI was away. Builder's tip #1 - never neglect work around the home otherwise you don't get to play airplanes.
26th January Watching Stefan row at Lake Karipiro.
27th -28th January Spent most of the rest of long weekend working (as in paid work) but did get a bit of time just to do a bit more... sanding. One of these days I'll get quite good at it. I removed the starboard door to see how much damage I had done to my paint finish when it caught the lip earlier. It wasn't too bad at all and should be fairly easy to fix up. I had a close look at the doors on ZK-UBD (alright I admit that it wasn't all work and besides, I had to practice for next weekend's airshow at Ashburton). I am going to trim back the doors further to leave a clear 1/16" - one mixing stick - clearance at all points. Handy things those mixing sticks.
I have this sneaking suspicion that I am not going to get airborne this year as things are suddenly very busy at work and unfortunately it's work that gives me the money to play airplanes...look after the family...and feed four ravenous cats. Thank goodness this is just a hobby and I don't have anyone screaming at me about deadlines. The only downside is that even the local petrol station attendants are now asking me when it is going to fly .
29th - 31st January No building.
