Well, my first attempt at the wing vents was unsatisfactory because of the step at the aft end of the vent ramp where I plugged the trailing edge. They looked okay from a distance, but up close they were not cutting it.
Here I’ve just installed the plug at the trailing edge but had not trimmed it yet. After trimming it I tried filling in the step with some filler but could not get in there well enough to sand it down and it ended up looking even worse.
So I cut all of that out and cleaned up the opening. For the second attempt I took a .015 thick piece of styrene sheet and bent a slight angle on the aft end to fit in the area needing the plug… The remainder was fed into the opening of the vents. This left a ramp that I was looking for. Then I glued in the verticals again. This time, they would end up with a gap at the trailing edge because of the change in angle of the ramp.
You can kind of see the gap on the verticals at the trailing edge in this photo.
This shows the gap much better.
Once the glue had cured, I slowly trimmed away the verticals until only a small angled sliver remained. Because of the gap mentioned earlier, the slivers ended short of the trailing edge, which is what I was after.
These were then carefully sanded to the final height. All that remains is to fill the small gaps. I think they turned out much better the second time and I will remember this lesson for the future should I have to do something similar.
Once the gaps are filled and primer added, this should look exactly like I want.
