Before heading down to Nick Ugolini’s in Charleston, SC for the weekend to pick up my spare Silver Bullet prop, some other LEZ gear, and do some flight transition training in his Cozy, I wanted to get a good little bit done in the shop before being gone for yet another few days.
I started by pulling the peel ply and trimming the overhanging CF with my Fein saw on the bottom cowling top center gap fill layup. As I suspected, which was a bit harder to tell than you’d think when I laid it up, the gap fill is going to need some tweaking.
I may even round the out the aft edge of the bottom cowl here somewhat as it was before. I’ll ponder this while I’m gone and let it germinate.
Here’s a side shot, which admittedly doesn’t really show the slight asymmetrical issue.
The main task I wanted to knock out, and let it cure for a good few days while I was gone for multiple days, was a reinforcement band layup on the aft side of the top cowl. This reinforcement layup is primarily to help keep the top cowl off the spinner, which without the foam block spacer on the top of the flywheel… uh, it’s a bit too close. Especially after I re-added some length to aft edge of the top cowling.
My layup schedule was 2 plies of 1″ wide UNI, and then 2 plies of slightly wider CF.
After wetting out the UNI glass and CF I then peel plied the layup.
I let the layup cure for a good hour to set up a bit (I used Pro-Set with medium hardener) and in the meantime I placed five 0.3″ spacers around the perimeter of the spinner (technically the flow guide) and then mounted the top cowl in place.
I then left it to cure for a good few days while I headed down to Nick’s for the weekend to pick up my backup Silver Bullet prop, etc.