These past few days have been pretty rough for this project. On Monday, I took the side panel outside to to cut more precisely the larger, rougher cuts (the ones made last, when it was getting very dark outside). Satisfied with the more precise cuts, I once again took to hand filing with my $5 radio shack precision file kit, and I broke one of the two flat files.

My fingers hurt just thinking about filing now.

Last night, I was finally satisfied enough with my filing, that I broke out some heavy grit sandpaper and used it to clean the edges up some more. That broke way into sanding the whole panel. Not too hard, but enough to prep it for a lighter grit sandpaper. My wife even wanted to get in the action, so she took the opposite panel and started sanding it as well.

Here's a shot of it as of this morning.

It was a slow morning at work (and I bring my project in when I anticipate it being slow), so I decided to break out the bondo.

The instructions say to use thin coats and let it dry for 25 minutes between applications, but I've got these deep holes to fill, so I just slathered it on. The surface dries so fast, that it ended up looking pretty messy by the time I got finished, but it should buff out, right?

Here it is after a few minutes of drying. I guess you can probably tell I'm new to working with bondo.

I decide to play it safe, and let this first coat dry the rest of the afternoon.

So I turned my attention to the camoflauge wrap. Remember how I said I was going to ask about getting the recipients name-tape sewn on. I pulled out one of my old ones, and laid it on to get a feel for how it would look.

It looks pretty horrible in any position in my opinion. The only place it might look semi-decent is on one of the empty drive bays. I decided against it for now, and that freed me up to undo the tape holding the cloth to that clear-green plastic piece, and redo it with hot glue as planned.

It went great, and I totally got all the bunching out of the curvy areas, but unfortunately I ran out of hot glue stick (I only brought one with me), so I'll hold off on showing you all a picture of it until its finished.