funkey4

Before I glued any wood in, I gave the whole fuselage a nice warm bath in the bathtub and washed the whole thing with dish soap to remove any wax or mold release.

After completing all construction, I sanded the entire thing with 400 grit sandpaper, dry, to get rid of the shine. This took most of an evening to do, but I want to make sure the paint will adhere to the glass well. These photos are after the entire fuse has been sanded. I'm waiting for warm weather to shoot some primer on it, then on to filling all the pinholes....

I cut the cooling hole in the bottom of the fuse tonight, Jan 2nd. The hole is 55mm wide and 95mm long, and is about the width of the Raptor frames, and the length is from the back of the front landing gear strut to the bottom of the crankcase measured on my stock Raptor. I hope this will provide adequate cooling airflow over the engine.

Nice sunny day here today. Got a chance to prime all the parts and apply Nitro-Stan to all the pinholes and blems. As you can see, most of the seam line required filler, and the rest of the red spots are where there were pinholes. As usual, after applying primer, a lot of pinholes that I couldn't see before showed up.

I decided to use some leftover auto primer I've had for years. I thinned it and sprayed it using a Preval sprayer, one of those cheap disposable paint sprayers available at hardware stores. I was too lazy to get out my spray gun just to shoot primer. The Preval unit worked very well, and required no cleanup!

Tomorrow I will wet sand all the red off and most of the primer. After that, one more coat of primer to make sure all the blems are gone. If they are, it'll be time for panel lines and rivets! If not, one more application of Nitro-Stan then wet sanding.

Jan. 6, 2001

Here's what the fuse looks like after sanding all the spot putty off. It's ready now for another coat of primer, then I'll do the panel lines and rivets.

I covered the hole that I had to make for nut clearance with a little fiberglass cap I handmade. I found a license plate screw that looked just right when I put it in the hole. I filled the slot in the head of the screw with filler, sanded, then waxed the screw head. After mounting the screw in a vise, I applied a layer of fiberglass cloth followed by 2 layers of .6oz cloth all with the same mix of 5min epoxy. I pulled the cloth layers tight over the screw head, then let it dry. After it cured, I pulled the glass cap off the screw, trimmed it to fit the fuse, then CA'ed it in place. The pic shows it after applying a coat of spot putty that I'll sand most of off tomorrow.

I painted the exhaust stack today. First I sprayed a coat of chrome paint on it. I then extremely thinned a bit of gold Testors enamel and sprayed that on with my Badger airbrush. After that, I finished it with very thinned black using the airbrush to give it the sooty look. It came out pretty good. It was actually pretty easy to do and fun to see the results....