2/24/2008
Yep! I'm back at it! Finally have some time again, I'm in town, and I'm not sick! This will be the start of regular work on the airplane again...until parts and money runs out again...
Today I finished polishing the firewall. Several weeks ago, I started the polishing with some stuff called NevrDull, and it got the stainless steel firewall to this point-
You can see that I blocked off the holes for the brake line stuff, and covered the recess hole with cardboard. The reason being is that the polish rouge and liquid will splatter around since I'm using my air drill with polishing pads.
The Caswell polishing kit comes with three grades of rouge. Black for getting the nasty rust and sludge off of dirty metal (I didn't use this one...), green is the medium grade that I started with, and white rouge is the last one before the liquid polish. Here is the result after the green rouge-
Pretty shiny! You can still see swirl marks from the pad, but the shine is definitely coming out. Stainless steel is SO hard, that it really is difficult to get a mirror finish.
After the final white rouge, and the liquid finishing polish, here is the FW with the brake reservoir and lines plugged back in.
The flash created a funny reflection on the pilot's side of the FW, but it really is nice and smooth! It's not cloud-free, but stainless is hard. I'm very pleased with this level of polish tough! It looks much better than what I started with before any polish!
Before I quite building for the day to get the finish kit hardware organized, I installed the brake pedal return springs. These are from McMaster Carr, and are a very cheap ($5) way to make sure I don't get stuck with a stuck brake pedal.
Tomorrow I hope to get started on the canopy release mechanism.
3.5 hours