The installation of the skylight in a Freedom Panel is really very simple - cut the hole along the joint line between the inner and outer skins, drill holes for the hardware, push on the weatherstrip and bolt everything in place. Well, there is one more step, those are all the very easy steps.
After you cut the hole, there are two places where the gasket surface isn't flat (four if you're doing an early model Freedom Panel). The two spots looks like this:
The goal is to have the surface flat on both inside and outside and a consistent thickness all the way around, like this:
And on the outside, the ribs have to be sanded back to look something like this, and the paint touched up:
The process: with the panel upside down, fill in the "low spots" with several layers of fiberglass mat saturated with a resin that's compatible with the SMC of the panel (I covered resins earlier in this thread). Once the resin is cured, sand the inside flat if necessary, flip the panel over, and sand the "high spots" of the rib to look like the last photo above.
I used the same resin technique that I did earlier in the thread - a first layer of SMC-compatible resin followed by subsequent layers of white-tinted ordinary polyester resin. To do the whole thing in one step you could use all SMC-compatible resin, or epoxy resin.
The reason I posted this is to now ask this question: how hard does that sound to you? Easy? Difficult enough to stop you from doing the project? Something you haven't done before but you think wouldn't be afraid to tackle it?
