Previous Builder          Next Builder

The cutouts from Step 6, I did immediately after glueing the foam blocks to the canopy frame. Now it was only filling them with epoxy-flox mixture. After that I place cling wrap on my work bench and placed the first ply onto it. Filling it with resin and using a squeegee to not overwetten it worked reasonably well. But placing the form over the canopy arms did absolutely not. At first, I sought the guild at the light weight cling wrap and switched to another firmer wrap. This time I needed to go to the other side, because the form flipped side from tranferring it to the other wrap. However, I turned out not to work any better. So I quickly cleaned both sides from my mess and went inside to recut a new ply #1. I already wanted to call it a day and suspected the type of cloth to be the culprit until my technical advisor called and clarified that that wasn't the case.
Next, I manually pressed the ply #1 into its position over the canopy arms, and use the brush with the shortened hair to spread the resin and push ever so little in each direction until I reached a satisfactorily result. For layers 2-5 I did the same.
Considering how much trouble I had, I am quiet satisified with the result. Maybe the recesses, thos areas where there is nothing below, are a little bit deeper than they might have been with the cling wrap. But who knows, it might also be that this just shows prominently because I used white dye for my epoxy, since I want to paint the skirt white. On the tube of the dye West systems advertises it, that this color shows even the tiniest inconsistensies.
After about an hour, using the slow resin/hardener (206) mix, at abround 65 F, I had to remove one bubble on top layer on the right side.
BTW: I decided not to fight those fibers at the aft and lower border because, to my understanding, these areas will be cutoff after curing anyhow.

Previous Builder          Next Builder