September 23, 2007 was the first part of this process.  The cores were laid out on channel jigs in preparation for the glass work.  

The torque tubes had been sitting around for a few years and showed their age.  Our first order of business was to media blast to clean the outside up.  But how to attack the inside?  

We eventually wrapped some emory cloth around a slot in a dowel,  stuck the dowel in a drill and went honing.   This polished the insides of the tubes fairly well.  As we wanted to keep the tubes this way, we decided to apply zinc chromate paint to the insides of the tube.  Again, we couldn't figure a good way to get the paint inside the tubes.   Our solution was to pour a goodly amount down one end and toss the tubes in the air to spin them, then stand upright to drain the excess. Other than putting on a little too thick a coat of zinc, this technique worked fairly well. If any of you readers have a better way to do this, let us know as we have a few more of these tubes to do down the road.

At right is a picture of the work done on the torque tubes in preparation for glassing into the elevators.  We purchased our NC-2 pieces from the Cozy Girrrls.

LEFT - we have the second surface of the elevators going on.  The manual states to make these lay ups as dry as possible. They ARE dry.  We're not exactly sure, but the first surface (done on a previous day) went on a lot easier— meaning it sucked up the resin from the micro fill without us needing to we the cloth further.   This was NOT the case with the second surface.   We had thought we had done everything the same.  However, we were forced to come back and dab some resin into the glass to get some of the dry spots at least damp.

 

 

If you click on the picture at left, you'll see just how dry this lay up is.  While we didn't leave those dry spots just sitting there, we wanted it to bee seen just how light we are trying to make these pieces. We've been told that weight is a real issues since the counter-balances have to deal directly with the mass of these elevators.  Ours are going to be light!