February 10th – Continuing with the upholstery, the side panels required trimming to fit around the throttles, flap handle and wiring bundle on the passenger side.

When I was working on the pilot side, I took time to come up with a parking brake. As others have done, I used the flap handle as an anchor point for a latch attached to the brake handle; it will remain to be seen how effective the brakes are with the flaps in the fully up position, but when one notch of flap is applied, they are firmly engaged for engine run ups and the like.

I had another visitor to the shop. My nephew Xander stayed with us for a few days, and as his Mum and Sister got to build a part, we had to find something for him to do.

There are no more components to build, so he started on the next big project, polishing. He took care of various inspection hatches and got them up to a mirror shine.

I want to get the fuselage shined up so I can get the registration number applied as it is a requirement before the airworthiness inspection

So then it was back to the polishing grind stone. I got a pretty good start on some of the panels before assembly, but my skills improved and I wanted to get some consistency of finish.

As I worked on the left side of the aircraft, I noticed that the panel by the cockpit entrance had some fairly significant scratches that would not polish out. I ended up having to sand that panel, starting with 400 grit and working up to 3000. I followed the sanding with 10 passes of grade 1 and 15 of grade 2. This resulted in a pretty shiny panel.

I then moved round to the other side, and found the same issue there, so I sanded and polished that panel too. As I moved on down the fuselage, I noticed that there are actually little scratches all over the place.

I am not prepared to sand down and polish every panel that I have already done, so it’s going to still end up pretty shiny, but won’t be flawless. I’ll be aiming for a ‘2 yard’ finish.

I will be continuing work on the polishing, but in March, I am planning on taking the fuselage out to the hangar and doing final assembly.

Stay tuned…