Alright, new progress again, finally!
I went in a couple days ago and figured out how big I was going to make the comparment for the pop-out awning. See divider here:
I had to abduct some of my supporting structure to put the divider in there, which showed me some about the shape the shell is going to take when I remove all of the support in the middle. The top goes from a nice spherical shape to a cylindrical shape.
I'm going to make a couple of shallow cross-supports to go from side to side and set the width of the top of the shell to help it keep it's shape as and after I glass everything up.
Here are roughed out the corners up by the cab:
And finally started laying some fiberglass. I started with both ends of the shell. I followed someone's advice on here and, after sanding the foam surface, scored it to give some ridges for the epoxy to flow into. Then painted on resin, laid the glass over, and wet it out with the paint brush:
I've been really nervous about actually starting the fiberglass, so I'm sort of building confidence at this point. It's going easy enough that I'm going to go ahead and start the exterior surface in the next couple of days... or maybe next week... I'm abandoning my weeknight routines to start making headway again, since I don't expect to have a weekend home any time soon.
I want to be able to do the whole shell without using much body filler. I picked up a small container of microspheres today to blend with resin to make fairing compound to use in place of filler for smoothing out any rough stuff after I lay all the glass. I figure I'll do that and then do a thin layer of polyester glazing putty before I primer and paint. I don't want to do loads of body filler, like I did with the bed extension, though.
Now that I think about it, what I might do is glass up the shell, do all the internals, like the lift hardware and all mounting points, first and let the overall shell and fiberglass settle a bit before I employ the fairing compound and whatnot to finish it. When I did the bed extensions, they started out mirror smooth, and then settled into a lumpy rippled surface (great 6-footer pieces), that I'd like to avoid w/ the shell... hmm...
Oh, also got my lexan all cut up nice for the front window on the shell. Pictures of that when it's time. :P