After a number of stops and starts due to work pressures, I finally finished applying 4 coats of Smooth Prime to the newly-installed gear leg fairings last Sunday. These are the fairings that Klaus
Installing the fairings will be documented here in more detail with photos, once I get this blog properly photo-enabled.
Even though I only had to perform a small amount of sanding, it was tedious enough for me to have acquired a much higher level of admiration for people who have sanded an entire plane (not to mention Jesse who after sanding my plane, went on to sand a Cozy IV...).
More finishing work will be required on the gear legs, particularly where the bottom and top parts of the fairing joined. The fairings are supplied as two moulded carbon components for each gear leg. One longer component is for the top part of the gear leg, and the shorter component is for the bottom half. These moulded parts did not fit together well, which required me to cut away some of the inside gear leg moulding and lay up 2 plies of BID over a carved piece of foam to replace it. That area will require some additional filling and sanding before the gear legs can be painted.
At the moment the tops of the gear legs are faired to flow round the fuselage join, but the bottoms of the gear legs are not faired into a smooth junction to the wheelpants. I intend to build up projections from the wheelpants to meet the new gear leg and create a smooth transition from the legs to the wheelpants. The right side wheelpants will also require some more sanding and preparation before they are re-painted. This was the wheelpant that was left in pieces on the runway at Dallas Executive Airport when I touched down with low right-side tire pressure and the wheelpant hit a piece of loose something-or-other on rollout, which tore it off the plane.
This weekend, however, it is time for some flight-testing of the plane, in the form of a trip to Farmington NM to see Bob Holgate, who just purchased a Subaru engine which he intends to fit to a Long-EZ. More news and views of that trip soon.