Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Day 22 - Shoulder work

(Originally posted on August 15th, 2013)

The fender assembly is complete!  Just have to Bondo and sand it, and it will be ready for "prime" time.  One unfortunate thing, however, is that the skirt isn't level at all on the bottom.  It's a little worse than what the garage floor was leading me to believe.  What I think I'll do is add thin layers of HDF glued together and to the plywood skirt bottom to fill in the gap (unless someone has a better suggestion).  Then I'll sand it all down flush.

(I don't want the fix to be pure Bondo, because of the skirt and fender having to be detached/reattached repeatedly when transporting.)

The main bulk of work on Rainier today consisted of getting the shoulders ready for skin cladding.  I attached the proper angled slats, chamfering the ends of each slat by ~5°.  I also positioned the side slats wide side facing out, such that there will be plenty of room to attach both the front and back pieces of shoulder cladding (pro tip yet again gleaned from AdamSt's NDS build).

I used the card stock I bought at the Blick art store to make the template.  Even positioning these large sheets diagonally didn't quite give me complete coverage, but I was able to eyeball the missing bits when I traced it out onto the HDF board later.  I didn't get pictures of the jigsawed HDF, but I gave myself about 2cm of extra space all the way round in case I screw up with the positioning.  This might be a two-person job ...

Oh, I also finally got around to cutting holes on the shoulder top and bottom.  On the top, I used the router; on the bottom, I used the jigsaw.  The outline I followed was hand drawn onto template that roughly matches the "egg" shape of the bottom.  I'll also be using this template on the skirt top to match the hole when I line it all up.

I hope I'll get a chance to soak the HDF tomorrow and give the skinning a try!  I've been very much dreading looking forward to this part!

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