Jur's RV7 Aircraft Factory
2917 hours and counting
Some decisions in life are bare of any obvious logic

2nd epoxy day. Today I applied the second batch of 3 layers to the rear skirt.

This time, I had my girlfriend Cindy come out and take some pictures while I was applying the last layers.

Going bottom up, in the next picture I'm applying the last layers and peel ply towards the top center.

Moving to the top section near the doghouse. Still one more piece required in the center section. It's quite important wetting out the parts well and then making sure the pieces glue together welll.

You can achieve this by dipping some more epoxy resin on the parts which tend to stick up using a brush.

Same on the intersecting lines. You don't want any air traps or bubbles in here.

 A roller also helps getting the excess epoxy out on the final layers.

 Glueing on another piece.

And rolling it gently into final position. Enjoy the view of the master at work :)

Some more dipping edges with sticky hands. God I hate this... I find this worse than the fuel tanks.

Anyway, final layer applied. Now it's time to let it cure and start the finalizing part. I'm all excited to see it come off the fuselage and inspect the final match after trimming.

 More micro on the rear skirt.

After sanding, it started looking really good. I copied the black cutting lines through the resing as te microballoons seem to be more covering and less transparent.

Doghouse area.

View on the passenger side. I think we are close to taking this baby off and cutting it to it's final shape.

Peeled of all the peel ply and made some batches of epoxy resin with micro ballons to smoothen out the surface.

Here is the result of the first attempts and after sanding. Not bad, but more will have to be added and smoothed out again.

The wax and pva release film did a great job. The skirt popped off without too many issues. Had to convince it in a couple of places with some plastic lifters but overall it came off real easily.

As you can see in the image, I have drawn some vertical reference lines over the skirt and onto the fuselage to find back the exact same position and alignment after cutting.

The inside looks very smooth. I don't see the need to do additional filling with micro here. It will hardly be visible in the cockpit anyway.

I used a dremel cutting tool to make a rough cut passed the line and will be sanding and filing it down to final shape but couldn't resist put it back in place to see how it looks.

Next picture is after rough trimming on all sides. It's starting to look like a factory made rear skirt.

View from the top.

Then started to use the vixen file to further fine tune the cut to the cut line. It's a tedious job which requires patience and a good dust mask. As you can see on the sawhorses and the floor, a lot of epoxy dust becomes airborne and this stuff is not good for your lungs.