Too clever for my own good...

Yes, it was an OOPS on Thursday. While I did do an excellent job of glassing the masking tape to the rudder (!), that wasn't exactly the intended result.

Friday evening's plan was to remove the tape with minimal damage to the rudder. Armed with a chisel, a Dremel equipped with a sanding drum, and a Mouse with coarse, medium and fine sandpaper, I spent Friday evening and a good part of this morning working on the rudder. Here are the results so far,



The rudder actually looks better than the picture. I think the camera zoom and flash brought out and accentuated the detail, making things look worse than they really are. (Interesting, wasn't I complaining about not getting enough detail in my photos just the other day?!? Guess I'm hard to please.) You can tell I did not apply enough resin to fill the weave of the cloth, but I guessed there would be a lot of sanding involved, and another coat of resin would have meant more sanding. Because there is still a distinct line where the the glass ends I will work on two things this afternoon. I will continue sanding to minimize the line and I will glass another strip of FG around the rudder, overlapping the line. I will not mask off any part of the rudder for this afternoon's work!

While that is setting up I will work on my U-frame idea so I can glass the rest of the rudder tomorrow.