Ready for the Layup

I spent the whole Saturday preparing the layup work. And as usual, it took me much longer than I thought. This time it was due to the ever moving and changing glass cloth weave. I h*te glasswork!
It started pretty benign with some more masking.




Aligning these pieces was not exactly easy but I think I did a fairly good job after a while and I decided to let it be good.
Unfortunately, all the electric tape I had was black and as I intend to dye the resin black as well, this wouldn't really allow me to do a good fine adjustment of the cloth when laying it down. So off I went to the home improvement store of my choice to pick up some red electric tape.




I found it pretty hard to bridge a straight line from one template to the other. I tried to use a string but that did not create the line I was looking for. I ended up doing it manually by trying to keep an equal distance to the forward bow as seen through the canopy.


I drew the outline of the templates onto the duct tape to help with the alignment of the pieces of cloth during the layup and removed the templates. On went the second the layer of electric tape.




And then it all came apart when starting to cut out the pieces of glass cloth.


Here it's still looking good. See how I tried to be effective and avoid a lot of waste. Well, that wasn't exactly the problem. The problem showed up when I had cut these pieces out. Thanks to Dave's post about his experience when he did this, I knew that there was a chance to introduce some distortion to layout while you are cutting it. I used a pizza cutter as well as scissors and I would have probably not verified that the cloth was matching the template if it wasn't for Dave's post.
So I did check the cutout piece and it was in no way close to the template's shape. I later used it to cut the next smaller size.
I took me a few experiments to find out that it works much better when you first cut out the rough shape of the template from the large piece of cloth. The take the piece and put it on the table where you want to later cut it. Stretch it out and see that the weave looks even. Put the template on and draw the outline on the cloth. Start cutting and try to disturb the cloth as little as possible during cutting. Cut the critical edges first (the one facing the canopy and the skirt). Put the template back on and verify that with a little tweaking you can still get a good fit with the outline you had drawn before. If not, use a different color pen and draw the correction on. Make sure the critical edge is ok and then cut the rest. I left quite a bit extra on on the non-critical edges, to make sure I could adjust the cloth on the fuselage once it's drenched in resin.
This worked ok for me and I had no more pieces that were a throw-out. It took me significant time though to finish the 10 pieces. Here's the last one on the cutting table.


I sorted the pieces into layup stacks for left and right side in the correct order (1 is on the top and 5 is down below).


I also started scuffing the canopy but it got dark and I didn't take a picture, so you'll have to wait till tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, it is supposed to only get to 77 F after a high of 90 today. I think this will actually be helpful for the layup as it will give me a bit more time adjust everything before the resin will get gummy. I'll start in the morning finishing the scuffing job and I also have to lay down the mylar tape but other than that I am ready to go.