Last week’s efforts: The fairings for the tailplane had cracks in them which were fixed by reinforcing with strips of glass epoxy, applying epoxy filler and sanding. They are ready for painting. The fuselage needed a few more spots filled, otherwise it’s ready for the top coat. We have next Monday pencilled in. In preparation…

Painting Day! Laurie picked up Pete’s spray gun as we had been unable to obtain a 1.5 mm nozzle for Laurie’s gun. Thanks Pete! When we started setting up, I hunted around the shed for the gun I had used all those years ago for the Aventura seaplane wings. Guess what: my gun is EXACTLY…

Had to check a few things in the shed yesterday. It was hot! In fact too bloody hot to do any work. 38 deg is just a tad too warm for me to do any shed work these days. Today was much milder and I was able to finish the sanding of the horizontal stabiliser…

The last few days have revolved around the luggage deck. Significant damage was found which needed assessment by Pete. Following his visit I delved further into this area. This shows the central support cracked along its entire length. At least conttributing to this failure waa the use of fairly large wood screws which likely initiated…

Finished off sanding with 120 grit this morning, only a bit of 240 to go (about 1/3 of fuselage), except for horizontal stabiliser. Then took out the rudder cable pulleys from the rear cockpit. As expected, they washed out with WD40 and run like new. It is confirmed that they are factory originals from 1977,…

More sanding. It goes a bit quicker with 120 grit followed by 240 (as opposed to only the 240).

Having decided that the top coat will be sprayed, the sanding has started. The dull area at the tail is todays’ effort with 240 grit. Based on todays’ work, it should take about 30 manhours to sand the fuselage and horizontal stabiliser – but I guess we did have a few chats while sanding during…

When we looked at the push-pull wire used for moving the trim tab yesterday, I didn’t like the geometry which appeared to cause quite a lot of bending. With my seaplane I had a failure of a similar push-pull trim tab wire after 250 hours, which caused the plane to transition instantly from nice hands-off…

Today we sanded the 1st undercoat on the fuselage and horizontal stabiliser and applied the 2nd undercoat. I think it looks pretty good, but I think Laurie is more self-critical in that department. So the options from here are: a) Apply the top coat(s) by roller as for the undercoats, using a finer type of…

Laurie got back from Qland and we launched straight into applying the Norseal epoxy filler, preceeded by a de-dusting of the surfaces with moistened Wettex. We rolled on this very low viscosity mix in a couple of hours onto the fuselage, and another hour brushing onto the tail feathers. We only used half of the…