I have a few items on my to-do list to accomplish before I flip the fuselage back over. At first obviously it was all about getting the bottom strake skins laid up. Then it morphed into filling in the aft lower fuselage and hell hole, then the bottom cowling, now the hell hole hatch cover and ram air scoop.
Then came swapping out the button head screws on the landing brake for countersunk screws. And a bit of work on the nose gear doors. In addition, as you can see in the following pics I do need to do some tweaking on the landing light, and here specifically in the landing light pocket.
When I configured the landing light pocket in the nose I had kicked off the perimeter of the glass pad –the bare blue wing foam– to deal with later. Well, now is later. Clearly I don’t want to leave this bare foam in this state.
So I mixed up some micro and filled in the gaps along the edges of the nose landing light pocket. I’ll rough up the micro later and then paint it black as well. I also need to swap out the 1/8″ thick landing light lens for a thinner 1/16″ lens, which I plan on doing as time permits.
I then spent nearly an hour cleaning out the blue wing foam from the RAM air scoop. In addition to the wing foam, I removed the duct tape and peel ply as well.
Here’s a shot from the front opening, then the aft opening, of the RAM air scoop.
I then grabbed some shots of the RAM air scoop set near to its final mounting location.
I then took a bit of time to determine the quantity and spacing of the screw and CAMLOC points along the sides of the hell hole hatch cover. Since I don’t plan on getting into the hell hole or pulling this hatch cover on a regular basis, I decided to go with only 4 CAMLOCs total and all the rest countersunk screws. This was in part due to a good conversation with my buddy Brian Ashton that got me thinking that I don’t really need to waste a bunch CAMLOCs for this area down here.
Tomorrow will be July 4th, so I probably won’t get any work done on the bird. But I plan on hitting it hot ‘n heavy come the 5th!