All smooth.

Just finished smoothing out the fillets for the wing/belly-pan joint.

Smooth, baby, smooth…

I’ve also just shot the first coat of primer on the bottom of the wing.

Belly pan – part 2.

After letting it set-up overnight, the belly pan installation worked quite well. I’ve put in filler along the sides and front to start the building-up of a fillet on both sides.


One of the things I’ve been wrestling with was whether-or-not to install the air-tank for the retracts in the empty space of the belly pan. It would be a neat place to “hide” it, but I decided not to. With my luck, the only place the tubing would leak would be right at the tank, forcing me to rip all this apart at some point down the line.
So, in hind-sight, I think I made the right decision by going with a fuselage installation later-on. Still tons of room in the fuselage for it, so nothing really lost I guess, other than a slick install.

Belly pan is fitted.

After a ton of griding, sanding, cussing, etc., I finally got the belly pan to match the contour of the rest of the fuse and wing. It started off pretty good on the front, but the back was off by a good quarter inch.

Well, after all this, I will have a bit of filling and a small fillet to build on each side, but it’s in and the epoxy is curing. We’ll see how it comes out tomorrow.

Second coat underway.

After a brief bit of sanding, I have applied the first half of the second coat to the wing and stab.

In the mean time, I ordered a second P-47 kit yesterday which will be a fun-scale entry.

It’s from EasyTiger Models, one of my newer advertisers.

Not my photo – one of EasyTiger\'s pics.

Although not the same size and color scheme as the YAC kit, I hope this will be something I can put together quickly and get some flight time on, preparing me for when this YAC build reaches it’s end.

It has retracts, flaps and is in the 1.20ish size range with a 71″ span. A little brother, so to speak. Here’s a link to their P-47 page.

Wing & stab edges reinforced.

I put an additional layer of fiberglass around the edge of the wing and stab to hopefully keep the hangar rash bumps to a minimum.

This should finish the application of fiberglass. In a couple days it’s on to sanding and the second layer of epoxy to start to fill in the weave.