Today was all about knocking out the wing roots’ heat shield mounting tabs for the aft heat shields, which cover a good 2/3rds of the entire wing root.

This specific style of wing root heat shield was designed by Steve Beert after he had a plans spec heat shield break and a part of it go out the back of the cowl through the prop.  Luckily there was no damage, but he changed up the mounting style of his heat shields.

I’m pretty much copying Steve’s design, with a slight modification: due to the oil cooler on the left/port side and the autopilot roll servo on the right/starboard side, the front 1/3 of the heat shield will be inset into the wing root about 1.5″, whereas the aft 2/3 segment will be pressed up against the wing’s cowling mounting flange inboard edge.  There will be an intersecting dogleg at the junction between the two segments.

Here is the left side, with temporary slats to support the vertical portion of each laid up mounting bracket, which is essentially an “L” bracket facing into the wing root.  I prepregged the 5-plies of BID for each 1″ wide x 2″ total length tab.  After laying up each sets of tabs I then peel plied the layups.  I’ll further note that I used the same high-temp resin (HTR-212) on these brackets that I did for the internal carbon fiber engine baffles.

I then did pretty much the exact same thing on the right side.

Now, these layups certainly aren’t crazy hard, but with all the plies of BID that needed cutting (all scraps BTW) and working close to blind laying up the BID on the backside of the slats, it took nearly 5 hours total to get these layups knocked out.

Tomorrow I’ll do some more work on these and also attempt to get the bottom cowl aft baffle seal rib layups started.