It took forever, but I finally finished applying finish to the teak cladding assemblies. The varnish I applied in my apartment went on as expected. The 3-part poly was the foulest smelling nastiness I’ve ever worked with. And it took many more coats than expected to get the grain filled. I think they’ve got 14 coats on them at this point. But they’re beautiful, and THEY’RE INSTALLED.
That happened on Monday. It was the only thing that went well on Monday.
After bonding in the covers I went to install the fuel lines so I could bond the station 5 chases over the top. It was then that I realized that the hole I’d drilled for the hoses was too small. This was the same hole I used to size the chase. By applying the transitive property, you likely now understand that the chase was undersized as well. The chase it took two weeks to apply finish to. CRAAAAAAAAAP! This is likely to cost a lot of time.
Anyway, the chases came apart and had the finish removed and are now being rebuilt to accommodate the actual size of the lines that run through them. Grumble.
After that little debacle, I decided to work on the fuel system. I’m doing things a bit differently than Timm intended so I needed to move some fittings around. When I unscrewed them I discovered they’d been installed so tightly that the threads had stripped off the fittings and remained behind. CRAAAAAAAAAAP! Fortunately, RDS Aluminum is being very nice about this and is sending me new ones for free. But it costs time.
On a brighter note, I’ve started working on finishing out the hatch gutters and have installed drain tubes. That went entirely according to plan. As-designed the gutters have a square profile. This is tough to keep clean, so I filled them with some thickened epoxy and then took a top-bearing ball-nose bit and radiused the bottoms. I’m very happy with how this is working out.
Today we started fabbing a mockup of the console to test the size/look of the thing. We’ll put that in tomorrow to see how it looks.
-Ben