Nice progress today, but not many photos. I started out with the rudder while I waited for the heater to take the chill off in the garage. It needed two operations today. First was sanding down the SuperFil on the tip...
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…followed by bonding in reinforcements at the base of the fiberglass fairing. I don't know why, but on both sides the first builder cut almost all the way through the fairing edge, just above where it's relieved (much too far) for the control horn. I had actually broken the thin section of fiberglass that remained on the left side, so I cut and sanded two thin strips of wood (from a large tongue depressor) and stuck them in place with Hysol. They'll get varnished tomorrow.
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Once the garage warmed up a bit, I spent the rest of the day trapped behind a respirator, working on varnish. I'm going to pause here for a small rant:
It takes a very special kind of idiot to package poisonous, volatile and highly flammable chemicals in metal cans with spouts from which it is physically impossible to pour the contents without spilling them all over your work surface. Can someone please explain to me why we use this ruinously expensive, horrible s*** instead of buying $30/gal spar varnish at Home Depot?
Anyway... the markings on my mixing cups led me to prepare way too much varnish. I ended up with 16 oz, and tossed 10 oz of that at the end of the day. Once I had the varnish catalyzed and reduced, I put the first coat on one side of the floor boards, the bottom rib in the aft fuselage, the unpainted wood pieces that I used to mount the comm antenna, the new false ribs, all of the rib cap strips in both wings and the ribs in the new elevator.
I didn't take any photos of the varnishing since it doesn't look any different than the parts would otherwise. Lesson learned: use the ounce markings on the mixing cup and ignore the ratio markings to avoid a big waste of $180/gal material.