Tonight has been a night of gaps, both good and bad.

It’s New Years Eve and what have I been doing? Sanding Aluminum for the last 4 hours in a cold garage.

The good news is that I was able to get the inner dome to fit over the dome ring tonight with the correct gap at the bottom.

All it took was lots of Dremel work with the mini sanding disks. I bought a new box of 60 grit drums for the Dremel and they seemed to last a bit longer than the one’s that come in the original kit. I did try the grinding disk attachment too, but it was slow going and it seems to be polishing more than removing stuff, so I gave up and went back to the sandpaper drums.

I had considered running the dome against my bench sander, but decided not to after a small slip and I touched a shiny part of the ring that really didn’t need sanding. No biggy and lesson learned.

I continued to sand, test fit, rotate and mark spots that were touching, followed by more sanding, test fits, rotate …. repeat for 2 hours.

I’d been working so intently on the inner dome I’d clean forgot to check the fit with the outer dome attached. What I’d forgotten was that the inner dome is not as deep as the outer and sits up in the outer dome a bit. So I really didn’t need to get the inner dome to go all the way down on the lip. Luckily I stopped sanding the ring in time and a quick check showed that I was very close to the correct gap at the bottom when I had the two domes and the ring together. But I did panic for a moment.

On the last lap around the ring I ran a hand electric sander around with some 100 grit paper. Both inside the dome and the ring. It smoothed things out and was the last step needed to get things to snuggly fit together. I may go back and polish it later.

I’d also made a start on sanding the inner dome and test fitting it with the outer. I even went as far as removing some of the pie panels, but I’ll blog about it tomorrow and post some pictures.