What a day to sand fiberglass! It started at comfortable 60F and quickly rose to not so comfortable 88F, considering that one would be sweating while trimming the butt of the spinner to its scribe line.
It took a while to get all this excess fiberglass removed and trimmed to the scribe line. I left a bit more on for now as Van's will us have trim it to the spinner backplate in a separate step anyway.
The delicate step of cutting out the propeller holes needed some research first. I went to look at Dave's blog only to find ways of how to not do it. His problem was that he did not feel comfortable using a (rather large) hacksaw and controlling it along the fine line for the cut. He resorted to the Dremel which worked great except for the wide kerfs it left behind. So, I decided to try my small Wisent hacksaw I brought with me from Germany. See if you can see the kerf in the following picture. I promise there is one!
You were right if you found it on the left side. It was fairly easy to control the thin blade along the cutting line and so I finished all four before I had to make another choice. The question was on how to proceed to do the round cutouts. Van's suggested to drill holes on the inside of the cutouts that will later be removed anyway. I saw that Dave did that but the result asked for a lot of (annoying) sanding with a round template. Not something I was looking forward to do and so I gave a replacement hacksaw blade (super thin, the type I use in the small Wisent hacksaw) a try.
If you zoomed in, you saw that I completed the full half circle, perfectly following the line. It took a while but sanding would not have been faster.
The second one followed a few minutes later.
A tiny bit of sanding to smoothen the edges and the task was done. On to the tip of the spinner. No big deal there and the bushing went in.
It slipped right onto the pitot tube and is looking pretty good now.
That's when I decided to call it a day. The next step is to mount the propeller with its full set of hardware. I should be able to do this in an evening session - maybe tomorrow night.
Very nice!
ReplyDelete-- The How Not To Do It Guy :-)
Well, (blush), I think you came out with a good result still. I just felt that all that sweat for sanding those rough drill holes was not what I wanted to shed. And as the naturally lazy guy that I am, I knew there had to be a way of less effort ;-)
ReplyDelete