I started out the first half of the day today at the airport helping Guy Williams fix his right main gear, which had the wheel leaning inboard a bit too much; which was allowing the brake disc to rub against the heat shield, and eventually a bit on the gear leg as well (not too bad though).  Was this a result of some other heat causing issue?  Or was this THE heat causing issue?

Kind of a chicken vs egg scenario here on what the initial heat issue was, but the bottom line as you can see from the looks of the normal left gear leg (pic 1) versus the right gear leg (pic 2)… there was a definite need for some intervention.

With a couple of hair dryers and laser thermometer in hand, we essentially heat soaked the right gear leg just above the axle and got it up to about 177° F max temp.  Most temp readings were in the 150-160° F range.  I had Guy buy a rather robust steel pipe, about 2′ long, which we slid over the axle.  This helped not only provide weighted pressure to help motivate the axle/gear leg to pivot back inboard, but also gave us an indicator as to if and how much movement was actually occurring.

It took about 2 hours total of heating, watching and assessing, but the bottom gear leg definitely pivoted very slowly back very close to its original position.  By using a level and taking some measurements after we had it setting fully on both gear legs, I estimate that if we had spent another 45-60 minutes we may have been able to get the last 1/4″ back to get much closer to exactly matching the left gear.  But our initial assessment showed it was definitely very close to good as we left out to go to lunch and let the gear leg cool down to ambient temperature.

The bottom line is that Guy is happy and we both are very confident that this dog will hunt!

Now, back in my shop I knocked out the sanding of the round 2 application of micro inside the left strake RAM air scoop tube… which was a little rough inside.  With the micro sanded to a nice smooth tube shape, I then epoxy wiped the sanded micro/inside tube over the remainder of the evening.  I got 3 epoxy wipe coats in total.

I had already cheese grated the micro I had added to the top cowling, and tonight I prepped and mounted the top cowling back on the bird.  I will note that just prior to installing the cowling, I sanded down the wing seam areas that interface with the cowling side edges.

I then gave the micro’d areas a thorough initial sanding using my orbital sander with an 80 grit disc.

Now, as I was installing the cowling, I put the majority of the left side CAMLOCs in first, and didn’t realize that the front right corner of the top cowling was not seating well with the wing & strake edges.  So I didn’t sand the front right side of the top cowling tonight, and will work that tomorrow.

I did tape up and prep the bottom side trailing edges and aft vertical ‘walls’ of the top cowling in prep for micro.

And then whipped up some micro/West 410 and slathered it on both sides of the top cowling.  Again, I’ll note that except for a few minor adds or fills, this pretty much completes the major micro filling for the top cowling.  In addition, I will be adding phenolic “washers” at the CAMLOC mounting hole positions to ensure the holes don’t break down or crack over time due to use (as SO many composite aircraft cowlings do).

I also spent a good bit of time both inside the house and at the plane assessing and attempting to finalize my wing leading edge landing/wig-wag lights install plan.  Here’s a quick teaser of where the left wing leading edge light pocket will get installed.

And with that, I called it a night.  And yes…
still pressing forward!