I started off today by pulling the weights and the tape off the oil check door… so far at this point the egregious fitting of the first door configuration has been remedied, with the door secured very closely in alignment with the surrounding top cowl surface.

Before I freed the oil check door into the open position, I wanted to have it physically secured to the hinge tab (with more than just flox and glass) so I prepped 2 stainless steel cherry pop rivets by shooting them with primer.  Hopefully this will eliminate or at least mitigate the galvanic corrosion that can happen between steel and/or aluminum with carbon fiber.  I have to note here that that’s one of the big downfalls of carbon fiber.

Here I’ve drilled out the previous rivet holes and installed 2 of the 4 rivets on the door: the forward and middle one.  I’ll wait a good few days for the flox to really cure before doing the other ones.  I also replaced a cowl-side hinge soft rivet that was a little proud of the surface as well.

There was just a tad flow of flox from mounting the door to the hinge, with both of those secured in the closed position… but a little gentle prying on the aft side of the door popped it right open.

I then closed the door and secured it with the wire securing latch, and yes this is actually a pic of that to show my oil check door seating is no longer all cattywhompus.

After a good deal of assessment and some test runs, I then bent the wire 90° and trimmed it just under 1.5″ long.  I welded a semicircular push-pull tab onto the wire and then primed and painted the tab.

I had to run out and pick up my friend’s daughter and take her back to her house, and also stopped by the grocery store for some stuff on the way back.  This gave the yellow paint a good bit to dry, and I carefully tested out the oil check door wire securing “latch” operation… I’m happy to report that it worked a treat!

With my oil check door wire securing “latch” operationally good, I then proceeded to tack weld a small safety tab in position to keep the wire from exiting too far out the aft end of the cowling into the prop.  Well, that was the goal of this task.

Between a slight rock of the welding table —which I remedied— and then having to work the TIG welder pedal while standing, I had an issue with the pedal snagging up on the table crossbar as I was cycling the pedal up and down during my welding.  Although I wasn’t getting a good burst on the tack weld, after a couple of cycles the metal was warmed up.  Then the pedal final came off its crossbar snag, let loose, and went “full throttle” on the warm wire —blasting it in half.

I then spent a good 15 minutes of improvisational welding to get the wire set back into position… resulting in ugly but hopefully strong welds to secure it back in position!  What a PITA!

Here’s my final <ugly> safety tab/GLOB weld on the oil check door securing wire.

Now, over the past week I’ve been pondering how to secure the aft end bent push-pull wire to the inside of the top cowling as both a safety measure so that it doesn’t work its way aft (or release the oil check door), and to keep down on vibrational chatter on the side of the cowl.

I decided to go with a simple clip that the wire snaps into when the oil check door is secured closed.  That resulted in an assessment on whether that clip should be metal or composite.  I landed on simply laying up 3 plies of carbon fiber to create a securing clip (think tape measure belt clip) on the inside side wall of the top cowling.

Here’s that layup with a taped metal block to keep the carbon fiber pressed down to the underlying mold.

As you can see, I laid up the carbon fiber (using hi-temp HTR-212 epoxy) and then peel plied the layup.

I also hit the yellow tab with a couple more coats using a brush.  I then left the layup and paint to cure overnight.

Tomorrow I’m attending an event with Jess that will eat up most of the day, and then after that my week should open up to get more stuff done! (hopefully).