Looks like we’ve got ourselves an airplane

Finally have started covering. It took a while to get the fuselage ready to go and cleaned up, but it’s finally going.

I put anti chafe tape around any sharp edge and exposed rivet I could find. I may have gone a little overboard, but I’d rather not worry about it afterwards.

Started with the bottom of the fuselage first. Nothing too hard, but it took forever to make all the cuts. I felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all. Cutting the fabric to size isn’t hard, but it’s very nerve wracking for me. We’re using Stewart Systems covering process, so we had glue on the frame and then tacked it down with an iron to hold it in place so we could work some big wrinkles out. After it was fitted, I brushed glue down through the fabric and wiped off the excess following the Stewart Systems procedure.

One thing I noticed was that as I brushed glue down into the fabric, the fabric was coming off of the tube. I tried tacking it down with a hotter temperature on the iron and that seemed to solve the issue, so I think my iron was just not hot enough to really tack the fabric down. I looked over the fabric carefully after everything had dried and it was stuck on there pretty good, so I’m not worried that it didn’t adhere. Also, the fabric to fabric joint is the important one which will be next.

For the later part of my Tuesday evening, I started on the left side of the fuselage. Fortunately I had a friend stop by just in time to help me cut the fabric to length, We then applied glue to the bond area for the left side and then began to fit the fabric and start trimming it down. I finished up the night with only one more big cut to make because I was getting tired and didn’t want to fuss with the vertical stabilizer transition.

(7.5 h)