I was anxious to get the project underway, but I hadn’t received my shipment of epoxy yet, so I couldn’t actually start building parts.  As I began looking through the builders’ manual to become familiar with the work that lay ahead of me, my razor-sharp brain noticed a common theme to each of the first few chapters; before building a bulkhead, it was necessary to first build a bulkhead template. The templates are built as follows:

  • Adhere a full sized bulkhead blue print to a piece of masonite using Scotch 77 adhesive
  • Cut the masonite to closely match the edges of the blue print
  • Sand the edged of the masonite to exactly match the blue print contour
  • Blow off the dust

The result is a light weight, rigid commodity that will later be used as a guide to cut out the foam core sections that will be the heart of the bulkheads. The templates also serve as a baseline by which the finished bulkheads will be checked.

Since this process did not require epoxy, I went ahead and built all the templates required for the fuselage. The way the builders’ manual is organized, I should have built one template at the beginning of each chapter, but I had to work out of sequence to keep busy during the pre-epoxy days. No big deal.

The fact is, I finished all the templates and still had no epoxy. Now what? Well, digging further into the manual, I decided it was time to align the fuselage… another epoxy-free task.