Fuselage Covered and More...

Well, if you went to Oshkosh, you know we had a variety of weather.  EAA 2016 was hot and humid, then cold and rainy.  In spite of the weather, it was nice to catch up with friends that we only see at EAA.  I enjoyed the WWI aircraft on display, especially those that were rotary powered.  I even got the privilege of hand-propping the 130HP Clerget 9B that Tom Kozura of Koz Aero brought on a stand.  Here's a video Cindy took...

Once back home, I hit the covering hard.  Got the fuselage finished and the covering on the vertical fin and rudder.  Here are some pics of that:

Here's the covering on without any dope applied yet.

Nitrate dope was then applied along with the surface tapes.  Once the tapes were on, I spent a lot of time with the iron getting the pinked edges down nice.  I'm not a big fan of burying the tapes in dope or making the fabric look like it was dipped in plastic.  I like the finish to look original and show off the careful and accurate workmanship.

I also like to limit overspray, so the firewall, cockpit openings and other misc. openings were masked off.

Fortunately, when all that was done, we got a nice break in the weather with lower temps and humidity.  I rolled the fuselage into the paint booth and got the 2 cross-coats of nitrate, and 3 cross-coats of clear butyrate sprayed on.

In between dope applications, I started on the tail surfaces - getting the vertical fin and rudder covered.  Here they are minus tapes.  They will require some rib lacing first.

So, as the weather permits, I'll keep spraying dope on the fuselage and continue on the tail surfaces.  It can be tough to spray dope here in the summer.  Quite often it is just too humid.    Spraying in too humid conditions causes the dope to blush, which is water vapor condensing on the surface of the fabric as the solvents evaporate off.  This can affect adhesion of the fabric and is not recommended to spray in these conditions.  Even with retarder (which slows the evaporation and drying time) I seldom spray above 65% RH.  Regardless, there is always work to do!  

More covering to report on the next post.