Today I picked right back up with the fun of trying to hash out the junction between the cowl halves. After looking at some other build logs last night, I worked out a better idea for trimming the forward corners, which in turn allowed for me to make a much better attempt at nesting the spinner area.
This showed me a new problem: specifically, the material thickness in this area on the upper cowl is 1) not consistent, and 2) significantly thicker than the recessed mating area on the lower cowl. So I went to work removing material here; I sanded down the upper cowl mating area a bit, but decided to do the bulk of the removing on the upper cowl. So far, I’ve been through three or four iterations of removing material, smoothing the area out, and trial-fitting the halves together.
Things still aren’t fitting perfectly, but they’re a lot better. I can slide the junction almost all the way together:
But the junction still isn’t quite flush, as a picture from inside the spinner opening shows:
I’ve already surrendered to the fact that this mating area isn’t going to fit snugly at first – there’s just no way I’m going to accurately sand this stuff down to a precise fit. My goal is just to get it to a point where it nests properly, and then I figure I’ll cover one side with tape and mold release, then apply some epoxy-flox mixture and clamp it back together again to fill the gaps.
Similarly, the front corners aren’t exactly meeting beautifully. Maybe they’ll end up looking better once I’m really fitting the halves together, but I’m preparing myself for the possibility of needing to do some significant reshaping there to get things looking good.