N814LD: First Glass Laid

My wife, Lesa, and I tackled glassing the first side of the first FAP panel today. Things went really quite well even though it was our first time laying glass in many years.

First we cut UNI and BID to fit, then folded the fabrics and set them aside.

After vacuuming the surface of the foam and applying micro slurry (syrup consistency) first the UNI and then the BID were laid down and wet out with warm (30C) Aeropoxy using putty scrapers. Adjoining strips overlapped its neighbor by at least 1". The picture on the right shows the wet out layers getting a layer of perf-plastic before an absorbent 'blotter' layer and a layer of vacuum bagging plastic. We realized too late that we forgot to apply peel-ply to the aft edge where it will join the next piece. Oh well, easily addressed with sandpaper and acetone.

Here you can see the whole layup being vacuum bagged. On the right you can see Aeropoxy being squeezed through the perf-plastic into the blotter layer (the yellowish polka-dots). There is a lot more being squeezed out than I expected; I really thought we did and excellent job of removing the excess Aeropoxy with the putty scrapers. Maybe we did... maybe vacuum bagging is just that much better...