Today we finished the fitting of the top and bottom cowls, and located and drilled the hinges on both the top and bottom cowls.
The only real issue we ran into was on the bottom cowl. On the left side of the cowling the honeycomb material was too far aft, and caused interference with the hinge. We carefully bent the hinge to conform to the shape, and will use some epoxy filler to fill any void between the hinge and the cowling.
Yesterday, and again today we spent time adjusting the cowling. With the top cowl just about perfect, we marked out and drilled holes in the firewall-side top cowl hinges. Then we installed the bottom cowl and used a strap to hold it in place while drilling holes in the air inlets.
Today my Dad and I worked on fitting the cowling.
The first step was getting the top cowl firewall attach hinges to fit nicely. The instructions call for filing the corners of the eyelets on the firewall to allow the cowl-side eyelets to fit nicely in the area where the hinge curves from the top to the side. Then some fluting is needed on the cowl side to ensure a consistent curvature.
With a nice alignment of hinges, we moved onto trimming the cowling. There is a scribe line that shows where the cuts should be made, but it’s important to go through an iterative process of fitting and adjusting, since the scribe line is more of a guide, and certainly not exact. The cowling went on and off many times while dad carefully trimmed away to get a perfect fit.
The prop needs to go on before we can finalize the fitting of the cowling, but the majority of the trimming work was completed today.
