The production process we are using to build the Perlan is based on the normal process for mass production of gliders. (In the glider business 50 to 100 is considered to be a lot of gliders.) This is necessary for accurate control over the weight and other properties of the finished glider. Unlike a normal prototype, we can’t make allowances for inaccuracies in the building process like extra blobs of epoxy resin or dry spots in the carbon fibre.
This means we have to spend a lot of time creating plugs and molds. In this one part of the tail, there’s probably 100 man-hours of sanding and it’s not even halfway done.
