The last couple of days have turned into pure assessment and planning days… not so much that I had planned to do so, but a friend of mine had surgery on her foot and I’ve been playing chauffeur to her teenage daughter (who I’ve known for the majority of her life).  That’s affected my build schedule significantly over the past week.

I finally got a few good undisturbed hours out in the shop, where I started sanding down the layups I just did on the front top cowl CAMLOC tabs.  An unintended consequence of adding thickness to those tabs is driving the aft end of the cowl downward much more significantly than I would have thought.  My gap now between aft cowl edge and the prop spinner flow guide (“lampshade”) went from about 0.36″ to about 0.295″, in 3 distinct spots: 12:00 (TDC), 9:30 (L), and 2:30 (R) clock positions.  5/16″ is my minimum allowable clearance between prop spinner and cowling.

I’m assessing the mitigation of that gap, but will wait until I get the remainder of the top cowl front interface with the D-deck dialed in to take any further action.  I have a couple of tricks still left in my bag to deal with it.  In the meantime, as I often do, I’ll probably go ahead, accept the risk and install the prop… since I’ve come this far on getting that prop spinner worked into the mix of my cowling configuration, and as far as I’m concerned, the damn thing is getting installed on this bird!

So the top cowl went on and off a number of times.  I’ll note that there is just a hair more of finagling to get it on now since I finalized the wing positioning (a good while back) with extra washers on the left side.  I may drill out a couple of stationary CAMLOC receptacles to replace them with floating ones to see if that eases the finagling of the top cowl going on: the culprits being the 3 CAMLOCs along the lower left front edge.

So I’ve been slowly working my elevations between D-deck and top cowl front lip, and I finally removed a high point that I had identified and marked long ago (the hash lines).

I grabbed my Dremel tool and mini-sanding drum and went to town on the offending protrusion, then a good bit of elbow grease with a 32-grit sanding block.  Now along this this 3″ section the interface between cowl and D-deck are at the same elevation.

Then another few rounds of top cowl on & off to assess the oil level check door fit into and onto the top cowl.  I removed a small bit of baffle seal material that was getting in the way of the oil check door hinge and finally went a few rounds of bending the hinge on the underside of the door using 2 big channel lock pliers and stir sticks to protect the door & hinge surfaces.

I also secured the door with my “remote” opening wire to see how the elevation looks, and concluded that the aft most attach point on the inside of the cowl must be removed and reattached to get the door to sit more tightly against the inner flange.  The area I’m discussing is the on the left side in the pic below.

Now, although I bent the hinge where it attaches to the underside of the door, it only really affected the outer edges (aka front and aft side… since it opens inboard) of the hinge.  The middle is still relatively flat.  With the hinge attach point being a good inch from the edge (note rivets), this results in the front and aft inboard corners still protruding out rather straight… while the top cowling surface curves a good bit in this area (right side in pic below).

My plan is to simply add plies of carbon fiber to the underside of these corners to “fill the gap” between corner and cowling, and then simply sand down the tops of the corners to match the top cowl surface.  I’ll end my discussion by noting that this is a result of attaching a flat hinge (~5″ long) to two different interfacing surfaces (cowl & door) on a compound curved surface.  So I’m dealing with it!

Yes, with my refined plans in hand I will get to it… tomorrow.

Pressing forward.