White is Beautiful

Yea, there is some audacity in the title, but bear with me. Today was a day with a lot happening in the Garaggio.

In the morning I started by cleaning up yesterday’s gear intersection fairing layups. Basically trimming them, sanding the trailing edge to a nice tangent curve, and cleaning up any loose ends. I didn’t get a picture of it, but my roommate Cory was pressed into service to compensate for that third hand I am lacking. I am quite happy with them, and they will look even better once they have been microed.

After I was done with the fairings and making dust for the day, I cleaned the landing brake and cowl with soapy water, rinsed with clean water, and let them dry in preparation for priming.

Greg was able to come over for the afternoon. When he got here, we went straight to work on the epoxy wipe on the fuselage. We started by masking off areas we didn’t want to get epoxy on.

Then it was 4 coats of epoxy wipe on everything. Scraping as much off as we could, trying not to leave any runs, ridges, or otherwise nasty things to sand. The epoxy already sands like concrete, no need to make it any harder on ourselves. It took four and a half hours to do this with two of us.

The epoxy wipe went well, and will get sanded out when I am back from my trip. There are a few areas which look like I may need to actually go back and add a bit of fill and then re-wipe, but we will see.

The epoxy wipe took so long that I was not able to get to priming during normal workshop hours. At 5:00 I was already late leaving the house for dinner with friends. But I was so looking forward to priming the cowl, that I went back to the Garaggio after dinner. (Thanks Kevin for ironing my uniform so I could make it back to the shop!)

Here you have it, six coats of primer on the cowl. I also put 6 more coats on the landing brake. My other roommate Ryan kept me company and helped with rolling on the UVSP, thanks Ryan!

I’m really liking the epoxy wipe method. I found ZERO pinholes in the landing brake, and 4 total in the bottom cowl. Three of these were where I sanded through the epoxy wipe into micro. I can’t wait to sand out the primer and see where we stand.

White cowl is beautiful!