The upper and lower side of the tailplane (V-tail) are now done. The Ebechi and leading edge are sanded into shape and the tips are glued on. For the tips I used two pieces of 5mm Balsa with a layer of carbon glued in the middle. The tailplane is now ready to be glassed.

The upper side of both wings is also done. I’ve decided to use the full length of the carbon cloth and at the end of the wing just use carbon for the D-Box and the control surfaces. The weight penalty of this shouldn’t be too big.

Today I also started building the canopy frame of the Monerai. I first taped off the area around the canopy and coated the part where the frame is built up with three layers of wax. Then I painted a layer of thickened and coloured expoxy resin onto the fuselage and let this cure for an hour and a half – so that it’s still nice and sticky but also nicely stays put when adding material to it. I then added a layer of 80gr glass, using coloured epoxy. After that I added 10 carbon rovings, each just more than half the size of the canopy, to provide the rigid basis of the canopy frame. After waiting again for an hour and a half I then used epoxy resin, again coloured but also thickened with lots of micro-balloons, to build up the basis of the frame. It looks nothing like the nice frame it should become, but that’s normal. Once the resin is fully cured it should have enough material on it to allow me to sand the frame nicely into shape.

I also finished the bits from the small moulds (instrument panel, skid and tailboom end). The tailboom end was a bit of a pain. On the first try I didn’t manage to release it from the mould and ended up breaking it. For the second try I cut open half the mould and closed the cut with a piece of tape, before waxing it and building up the tailboom end out of 160gr glass. No problems releasing the 2nd attempt this morning.