Well, fellas, you're not going to believe this, but I actually worked on my Kitfox today. First actual work in the garage since Feb 18th, 2022.

I moved the car out for the winter (I'll regret that in December when I have to report to work at 5am), moved the wing cradle away from my work table and got busy on a job that I've been dreading since I brought the plane home: repairing the seat pan.

The first builder appears to have trimmed it with a hacksaw blade while three days into a bender. Here are just a couple of examples (there are many more like them):

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I went after it with coarse sandpaper and a rotary sanding drum. My idea was to sand back the damaged edges to eliminate the over-cuts, then add back material -- either with polyester repair putty and milled glass, or with glass mat and resin -- until I have enough to reshape the edges properly. Here are a couple of the bad spots after sanding them back:

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That second photo shows my preparation for adding glass mat to the back side to rebuild the area that's scalloped out of the edge. I've never done any fiberglass work before, so I'm relying on an article in a recent issue of Kitplanes about extending an engine cowling; it looked like the technique would work for this too.

For the small areas where the over-cuts were sanded back, I mixed up some repair putty with a lot of milled glass and slathered it on, making sure to get it spread onto the back surface as well. Here's what that looked like:

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In the center seatbelt slot, I didn't want to extend the slot by sanding so I just filled the over-cuts with putty.

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I fully expect the putty to take a week to cure since the garage is only 60-ish degrees, then it'll probably just break off the edge when I start to shape it. Apparently that's not a big deal with fiberglass, as it's supposed to be almost infinitely repairable (or so AlexM told me once). We shall see.

For now, the garage smells like a canoe factory so I'm back inside.

Oh, I almost forgot: the glass mat and resin repairs will have to wait. My PolyEpoxy crystalized into a solid mass in the can. Aircraft Spruce says you can heat it up and it'll return to liquid and work fine, but that it can take many hours to melt completely. I've repurposed a small crock pot to handle that job. Hopefully it doesn't poison my next pot roast...

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