What’s this, a blog post? No way!
OK yeah, I’ve coaxed myself past the “walk through the hangar and think of what I should be doing” phase and into, well, actually doing something. I’ve been tinkering from time to time with stuff relevant to the cowl, namely trying to figure out the right placement for my hinge pin covers, as well as a trial run for filling the old hinge rivet holes with flox. The latter isn’t really a complex procedure, but since I had some scrap lying around (the cutout for the oil door), I decided that trying a new technique on something other than the really expensive cowl was a good idea.
Turned out it really was pretty foolproof. Mix up epoxy, add flox (flocked cotton fiber) until I got a peanut-butter consistency, then work a bit of it into each hole. From there, I sort of worked the excess from one side of the material to the other to get good filling of the holes, while gradually scraping off excess. Worked out pretty nicely.
That was…a few weeks ago. Tonight, after doing various household chores, I talked myself out of continuing to sit on the couch and into getting those old rivet holes filled. I just had to remove some of the clecoed hinge pine, mask off some close-by holes that I didn’t want to fill, and then get to wiping flox into the holes…a whole lot of them. In addition to the rivet holes, I also filled the two holes I made in the lower cowl way back when, which I used during the fit-up process.
So now the rivet holes are filled and curing. Next I’ll knock down the area with some sandpaper, then I need to finalize the hinge pin cover locations, before hanging the cowl again and fitting and drilling the new replacement hinge halves. Eventually it’ll be back to working on all that micro I glopped around the prop spinner area, which will be lots of fun…