Day 64 - April 13, 2013 & Day 65 - April 20, 2013

Over the past two weeks we have been working on finishing the wheel fairing kit.  They went together very smoothly for the most part and look very good.  There are only a few things left to do with them before they are fully completed. 

 

Shown here are the brackets that the main gear fairings screw into.

 

The nose wheel fairing was probably the hardest fairing of the three to construct, because it screwed into the fork that holds the nose wheel (instead of brackets like on the main wheels) and had to clear the gear leg.

 

We installed more velcro for the interior panels.

 

Day 63 - April 6, 2013

This week we worked more on the wheel fairing kit.  It required lots of trimming, sanding, and in some cases pulling out the rivet squeezer and setting some rivets.  We were not quite able to finish the wheel fairing kit this week, but we came very close.

The bane of fiberglass is pinholes.  Filling the larger ones requires filling them in with a resin based filler and then sanding the excess off.  For the small pinholes that are not covered by the resin based filler, a special filler is used that wicks into the holes to fill them.

The left main wheel fairing.

The nose gear fairing proved to be much more difficult than we had expected.  It provided a nice challenge to test everything we have learned over the course of the program.

Once attached, the wheel fairings make the airplane look very sleek.

More next week!