Worked on Claude the Impaler a bit more this evening. When last we left our crustacean missile, I'd laid up two more layers of 2oz fiberglass on the fin section. I used my oven (heating it up and then opening the door) to accelerate the cure of the epoxy (since my house doesn't have a place that's above 70ºF, and I've had bad experiences lately with epoxy just not curing at all).
And it worked. A little too well, because when I went to trim the excess I found it impossible. The idea is to trim the excess cloth while the resin is still fairly soft. Hard enough it holds the lamination together, but soft enough an X-acto will cut it easily. Two hours according to Z-Poxy's label, but of course at higher temperatures, your mileage may vary.
So it took me about two hours with a coping saw, X-acto and my Dremel to finally get the claw shape back, more or less. And some of the edges delaminated in the process.
So going over the top of all this, I mixed up some 5 minute epoxy and microballoons, got it fairly thick, and scraped it out over the fins with a flat scrap of balsa. It's a bit lumpy, but it should seal everything up nicely and give me plenty of room to sand down to a smooth surface without getting into the fiberglass cloth. The microballoons will make it both easier to sand and lighter, and these are good things.
I may even need to do this again to get it to look like I want it.
I used the same mixture around the nose cone to fill in seams.
We'll see if I really have the patience to make this whole mess smooth, but that's the idea. I know I'm basically a big kid when it comes to this stuff, but I don't like for my rockets to look like some kid made them. And they always do.
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