21.08.2021 Exterior fibreglassing.

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Saturday 21st. 48-68F, bright start but with increasing, speckled cloud. Too cool for fibre-glassing and everything is still wet with dew. Should I leave the tarpaulin on to help to warm things up? Or uncover the dome for the sun to dry things out?

09.00 56F Started imaging. Cloud steadily becoming more dense from the west-SW.

09.12. Trying to capture the NE filaprom. I'm not even sure this is on the H-alpha band. A filaprom is a prominence which extends over the disk to form a filament.

Already cloud watching! I'll take off the tarpaulin to kill some time. It remained cloudy so I sanded the dome about 4" [10cm] out form the slit ribs and zenith board.

10.40 58F. There are two dark spot near the eastern limb bridged by a bright bar. Probably a flare. Too cloudy to capture even 5 seconds of video. Seeing shaky and bodily movement. Cloud still being a nuisance. 

10.45 Captured the twin spots and multiple flares. Not a very good image. The sky has gone misty and killed the transparency now. Grr?

I now have some much better bracket for the inner shutter ribs. I bought more silicone for sealing around the slit cut-out. Plus some much larger hole plates to replace the undersized pair. The temperature has reached 67F so I can start fibre-glassing. I have lots of glass mat already cut and torn into 16cm x 40cm strips. 

The silicone sealing went well thanks to a wipe with a finger tip. Along the zenith board and down the outside of the slit ribs. It adds that extra layer of confidence that there will be no leaks. Two lots of fibreglass are no guarantee of a seal.

4pm. I gave the ribs a pre-coating of resin to seal the surface. Plywood can draw the resin out of the mat if it is porous. I managed four layers of 300g/m² CSM on the outside/rear of the zenith board. Then the half litre of resin started to go off rather suddenly. Probably the warmth and being in full sunshine. Fortunately there wasn't much resin left and the final layer of mat was all but wetted out. Though not perfectly.

I have only half a litre of resin left. So I had better get an order off. There are several warm days of sunshine forecast. So I shall have a rest now. It is still rather cloudy for imaging and remained so.

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