Good news, after yesterday’s layup on the canard cover repair was cleaned up and the canard still fit! Therefore, I didn’t have a complete nuclear meltdown, and thus there was no mushroom cloud over south-central Minnesota today. We will have to wait for another snafu for that to happen.
After verifying that the canard still fit into proper position, I spent some time working on the forward hinge on the canopy. I am doing something different with the canopy hinges, and I need to finish what I am calling the hinge fairing. Basically there is a gap in the exterior foam along the outboard side of the longeron. I used foam, sheet wax, and aluminum tape to make a mold. Basically I put these items where I didn’t want anything to be in the final product.
Then this area needed to be filled in with the proper shape core. I probably could have done it in foam, but I chose to do it in flocro to make it a bit stronger albeit heavier. I will probably sand it down below contour and add a layer of BID fiberglass to each side to give it a bit more strength. I can’t wait to contour it to see how it works. I only did the forward one since I was not sure if it was going to be successful. If it is, I will do the aft one tomorrow.
Then I removed the canard and prepped the exposed foam areas around the canard cover cutout and canard saddles for layup. This included making the trough for flox corners as well as filling in the area around the elevator torque tubes. The clearance for the torque tubes had previously been opened over size. It was easily taken care of with a bit of pour foam.
The layup was done with one ply bid per plans. It was a pretty easy layup and went well with piecing 3 pieces together with one inch overlap at each piece. Then I peel plied the layup.
I learned something from the last few days. If I am not careful with layups in this area, the canard may not fit after cure. So I put release tape on the mating surfaces of the canard. I also put a piece of sheet wax on the bottom of the torque tubes to ensure clearance at the extremes of travel. Then the canard was installed and torqued down. This way we won’t have a repeat of yesterday’s Garaggio conundrums.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out tomorrow and cleaning up the layup. We are inching closer and closer to being able to put the filler on the fuselage upper surfaces!
the Garaggio 