Finished Tapes on Practice Parts

Ed and I finished the 3" edge tapes on our practice parts.  We again had to work with curved corners that take a lot of time to get the tapes to lay down nicely.  Once the tapes were worked with the irons to fit correctly a 2:1 Superflite U500 adhesive mixture was added to the tapes to secure them.  Hours: 1.5

Two Practice parts complete with edge tapes

More Fabric Practice

We continued our work on the practice pieces we are covering.  We are now adding the finishing tapes to the center members and we started work on the perimeter tapes.  We are learning a lot,  especially on the curved corners. Hours: 2

Adding perimeter tapes

Fabric covering the practice frames

Today we began covering the practice frames with fabric to get ready for the next stage of our airplane project.  Adhesive was first painted around the edges of the steel frames, and fabric is then applied (glued) to the tubular frames.  We intentionally made the frames with curves on 2 corners because that is a challenge to cover cleanly.  Yeah, we made some mistakes (but hey, that's why these are practice fames), but overall I think they came out pretty nice.  Once the fabric was glued in place, we shrunk it in stages at 250, 300, and then 350 degrees with irons that we calibrated yesterday.   Hours: 5

Two practice frames covered with fabric

Practice Fabric Covering Started

We've been doing a lot of cleaning and straightening of the garage in preparation of doing fabric.   We setup two "covering" tables for the process.  We bought a new wheeled rack for storing chemicals and tools.    And we've had to buy a few things, brushes, strainers, zahn cup (for checking viscosity).  Finally we started working on the practice parts.  We mixed up the U-500 adhesive (1 part glue/2 parts Acetone) and applied 2 coats to the trailing edge of the practice part.  Hours: 2

Glue added to one side of the practice pieces