The rear turtle deck of the Fournier and I never really got on. It is supplied as a vac-formed component which is trimmed to fit and glued over the formers and stringers. Initially I used the same Titebond which I have used for the rest of the build, however when I visited the shed the morning after I heard a disturbing crack when I handled the fuselage. Further investigation revealed the glue simply hadn’t stuck to the plastic and the entire deck fell off. Oh, lesson learned then, Titebond and plastic don’t mix.

For the next attempt I used Canopy glue which seemed to do the trick, the bond was good and even after a bit of prodding it refused to budge.

After construction was finished, I moved onto the covering, for this I’ve stuck to something familiar, which is basic Solarfilm. The wings were covered pretty quickly and focus turned to the fuselage, this is where the problems began. The first bit I tried was to tackle the turtle deck.  The film went on easily enough, and as I left it in the shed I was quite pleased with the results. The problems came however the next morning when I popped into the shed to check on the results, to my horror literally hundreds of small bubbles had appeared all over the damn thing. I tried to remove these by turning up the iron and slowly working them out, at this point I managed to melt the turtle deck slightly such that it deformed.  sigh!

I made a swift decision to give up with the vac formed component, and proceeded to remove it completely, using the removed deck (I managed to get it off in one piece) as a template I fashioned a new one from 1/64" ply. I soaked the ply and clamped it over the fuselage overnight to dry, the next day it held its shape well enough to be simply glued on with thin cyano. A bit of filler around the edges and its looking acceptable again. Below are a couple of pics, also showing the painted cockpit, waiting for a pilot.