Skin work...giving up on dome sanding!

After spending what seems like days on sanding the dome (I have about 20 hours invested in it), I've decided to have it sent to a professional. Wayne Orr was kind enough to share the name and address of the place he's had his R2 domes sanded and polished up. Its not an outrageous amount and the dome just needs more work than I'm capable of. I can't wait to see how it looks when they get to work on it.

So I've moved on to working on my second set of skins. I have a serious love/hate relationship with these things.

For some reason, this set is giving me an amazing amount of difficulty. Almost none of the panels want to pop free without a struggle. I've broken 7 razor blades trying to free the panels. Its almost as if the laser was too fine or something. Honestly, I just wish they'd cut out the panels completely and include those when they ship!

So here's the skins ...


I've also taken the doors, from my other set of skins, and clamed them together to "form" for a few days. In the next day or so I'll clean them with acetone and dry them. After that, I'll adhere the door to the door frame with contact cement. Contact cement stays gummy like rubber cement for a few hours, so any excess is easy to peel away. Then, any edges that "rise" a bit I can hit with Superglue.

Notice the utilty arm cutout on the bottom. It took a lot of ginger effort just to remove that from the skins. Its bent up pretty good despite my best efforts.

...and as you can see, thanks to the lousy laser cutting, the effort to remove the piece has left a warble in the top part of the skin. Hopefully this will smooth out when bonded to the inner skins. But again, it truly sucks that these skin cutouts can't be done better. I spent an hour trying ever so gently to remove this one piece. Grrr.

I know, its not nice to complain about an otherwise excellent part. But it would be truly outstanding if cut-out process wasn't so problematic. I can only hope they use a larger beam, like what is used on the inner skins, on the outer someday.

Grumble Grumble.