06 Jun 08

Caroline and I came out early this morning, and I chiseled some of the weave off a butterfly panel to repair a mistake in the bagging process from yesterday where the bag crumpled the weave. After about 45min of that, we set out to pull a vacuum on the nose mold. We started by cleaning it off and ended up putting 7 coats of mold release wax on it to be on the safe side. Having a part that stuck to and ruined the mold would be disastrous at this point. We used a piece of shower pan liner with duct tape around the edges to pull the vacuum, and we had one tested by lunch with the woven veneer under it. Luke worked on gluing up trailing arms, while Zac and Ben fixed the other take-up roller on the loom and wove some more veneer. Caroline, Aaron and I spent the rest of the day working different ways to glue our pieces down to the nose mold and had them resealed and vacuumed with resin on by about 5:30pm. We did one third of the front half of the mold only and will lay the rest of the front in subsequent glue-ups. The front on the nose mold is far and away the most difficult part to mold, so we should be home free when we have it behind us. Luke picked up some more .240" veneer strips from our buddies at Tramway Veneer this afternoon, so we should be set tomorrow. After dinner, Caroline and I went outside to check on the glue-up, which was progressing nicely. We organized the area under the lean-to, hunt a couple items from the rafters, and moved the driver's side flank mold into our work area. We washed it off and put a heavy coat of mold release wax on it. We worked until about 9:00pm, at which point Hunt came up and checked us out. I stayed in the blue room until about 10:00pm chiseling a little more on the butterfly panel, which is essentially ready for the repair splices to be applied. Lots of body panel gluing tomorrow, so I will probably need some sleep.