I began the day by sanding down one of the drips on the resin radar eye -- excuse me: the pesky resin radar eye! Here you can see a bit of what I've been trying to resolve:
I took it outside for the first of several coats of paint -- it seems to be on the installment plan, getting a few light coats every day!
Next I tackled some of the silicon that had oozed out from under the dome panels. Using a tiny screwdriver, I drove the silicon out of each tiny groove.
After that I tidied up my workstation (which had gotten crazy!) in preparation for the rest of the work I planned for today:
It's been a while since it looked that good!
I readied the ingredients for my styrene/acetone slurry -- didn't get to mixing it today though:
The last bit of dome work for a while consisted of running a thin line of silicone around the bottom of the two domes, hopefully sealing them together. I also glued in the dome bumps. I'm leaving the rest until it's time to work on electronics in the dome.
For the rest of the day I had working on the skins in mind!!
I decided I'd try to fix that yellow styrene skin bit that had crackled ages ago. First some sanding, then outside to paint (truth to tell this didn't help much -- I may just go ahead and weather it as hubby had suggested)!
In case I needed any support pieces I went ahead and cut a few small scraps of 3mm styrene. Whew, it's been a while since I did that!!!
I'd looked at several ways of affixing the skins, and decided to "paint" weld-on in sections.
I got out some cheap brushes I'd bought for this purpose, and an old can to sacrifice for the weld-on. I also tore zillions of short lengths of tape, to secure each skin section as it got glued. I had to rip tape for each section (about 7 sections in all...)!!
Before getting going with the gluing, I ran out to save my radar eye from the merciless California winter sun before it melted! I think I'm done with it. I'll pull the masking tomorrow and see how that came out.
Gluing. I pulled off a section at a time, frantically painted the weld-on on its back, pressed it back on, and taped it down solid with those little bits of tape I'd prepared earlier. This was a MESSY, frantic endeavor. The glue globs flew everywhere! Some landed on the outside of the skin. I had paper towels at the ready, but some, uh..., weathering happened yet again!
As with the inner skins, the outer skins did not quite fit, coming up a little short. I'll fill this in tomorrow. I figured I must have made my big round frame cuts a little big, but when I tried on the dome ring later IT seemed a little big! This whole thing is mysterious...
The front view:
Gluing on some of the window frames on the skin:
As it happens, I apparently forgot to paint the small skin bits -- will do that tomorrow. Right now the skin application is mostly done, and drying overnight.
Final thoughts: my aluminum "striping" seems to be holding up well, but all the little grooves will need cleaning tomorrow, as some oozing happened here and there; if I had my druthers, I'd have used the VHB tape instead of the weld-on -- I think it would have been much neater. *shrugs* Ah well -- it's a done deal now!
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