So, in spite of trepidation, I figured I couldn't procrastinate on laying up the side panel any longer. Here's my work surface...a piece of 1/8" masonite covered in visqueen plastic.

I got the pumps back out. The check valves are a little flakey, so I'm still measuring with a scale.

I taped the passenger side stick up to the side of the airplane so the pilot side stick wouldn't get in the way.

Instead of spraying all the packing tape down with this mold release, I sprayed some on a paper towel and wiped it on the packing tape. Hopefully I don't regret that decision.

Two big improvements in one photo: First, I setup a temporary work area on a couple sawhorses to lay out and cut the glass cloth. Second, I remembered that I had bought this rotary cutter a while back. Holy hell...this thing is a gigantic improvement to cutting the glass with scissors. Probably takes the cutting time down by a factor of 10.

All cloth cut, first batch of epoxy mixed, and ready to pre-preg between layers of plastic.

I decided to start at the forward section. Here it is trimmed, laid into place, and covered with peel ply.

Second section laid up.

Third section. I'm using these bean bags (bags of beans from Dollar Tree) to prevent bubbles from forming on the arm rest.

At this point, it was about as warm as it was going to get today, so I took a short break to setup the painting stand to paint these two pockets.

Here's the second one right after application of paint.

Hanging upside down to keep dust out of the paint.

Fourth section (the flat area) and fifth section (up and over the bulkhead) laid up. Again, using bean bags to hold the layup on the vertical area from forming bubbles.

Here is the whole layup. I hope it's not a disaster when I go to remove it tomorrow.