28th September 2013 - Left Wing Top Surface UV protected and Primed

Today I started the task of painting the wings. As I've covered in ceconite I need to hide the fabric edges. The picture shows the way the lower fabric wraps round the wingtip. This creates an edge along the cut surface. Following advice from Jason at Stewart, I started by appying the usual three cross coats of EkoFill which provides the UV protection to the fabric (I'll reduce this to 2 on the underside of the wings). Then EkoPrime was applied along the leading edge and sanded, prime and sand, prime and sand... until the edge of the fabric was completely masked. The rear joint in
the fabric is on the trailing edge behind the flap/aileron so that needs no particular attention.

27th September 2013 - Left Wing Covering Complete

I decided that I would try and get the second wing covered as quickly as possible - so I put in a 10 hour day today and it is finished! - next to paint the wings.

26th September 2013 - Right Wing Covered, Left Started

I finished off the right wing today and then it was my wife's turn to help me re-organise the garage. The wings are awkward but not too heavy. First the left wing was removed from the garage, then right wing was stored against the wall, finally the left wing could be placed on the saw horses for covering.
I won't bother repeating the same pictures for the covering of this wing so it will be a few days before the next post.

25th September 2013 - Right Wing Bottom Covering Glued

Today I shrunk the bottom covering into place and then glued it in the same way as the top. The tips and trailing edges have been made off so tomorrow I can finish the leading edges.

24th September 2013 - Right Wing bottom fabric

First job today was to make good the leading edge of the top covering and the rear section of the wingtip. Then another piece of fabric was cut ready for the bottom covering. This was cut out to fit round the strut attach brackets. Then a 1" strip of EkoBond was applied round the edge of the bottom wing surface and allowed to get tacky. The bottom fabric was then applied and glued round the edges. Tomorrow this can be shrunk and stuck in place.

23rd September 2013 - Covering the right wing top surface

With the help of my neighbour Daryl I re-organised the garage to allow access all round the right wing which was placed on a couple of saw horses. I had previously called Jason at Stewart Systems to get advice on how to cover a fully sheeted wing and followed his approach. First a piece of the lightweight Ceconite was cut to size to fit the top surface of the wing.  Then a glue line (EkoBond thinned 10% with water) about 1" wide was painted around the edge of the wing. When still slightly tacky the cloth was laid over the wing and smoothed out as far as possible. More glue was then brushed over the glue line and, as always with the Stewart System, any excess was removed with paper towel to leave it matt looking. Once this was set the cloth was shrunk with the iron to remove any wrinkles and looseness.
Then it was a case of brushing (using a foam brush) more EkoBond, thinned 10% with water, over the entire surface of the wing and, as before, all excess glue was removed. I found that gluing about 2 sq ft at a time was about optimum to ensure that the excess glue could be removed easily.
Finally I made off the ends of the wing. and the trailing edge. The cloth will wrap round the leading edge and overlap the bottom cloth by 3". However no finishing tapes are required as the cloth will be completely bonded to the wood. According to Jason,  it should be possible to avoid the join being visible by using a small amount of primer on top of the EkoFill to level out the cloth edge. I used about 300g of glue to fix the cloth and as much of this is wiped off the approach looks like being lightweight. All together covering the first wing surface took about 3 hours - not too bad!

22nd September 2013 - Inner door skins installed and painted

The lightweight Ceconite arrived a couple of days ago so I was able to glue this to the inner framework of the door using the standard Stewart Systems approach. The cloth was then shrunk and filled with EkoFill and then topcoated in white. The topcoat had a couple of runs so I've sanded these out and will needed to respray a light tack coat and gloss coat at some later date.