Yup, I’m back at it again. Turns out a nice late-summer cool front is good motivation to get back out in the hangar.
First I picked back up on smoothing the lateral joint between the cowl halves. This was some pretty tedious work to be sure; there was a fair amount of material to be removed in many places to get the smooth transition, as well as smooth out the rivet heads. It doesn’t help that I’m sanding glass layup and gelcoat here, both of which are a lot tougher to sand than, say, micro.
At some point, I decided to spend my breaks (read “when my arms got tired”) working on fixing up the gap between the halves. This was generally OK in the middle of the joint, but too tight towards the ends. I took a hacksaw blade and carefully worked it from the OK areas out to the less-OK areas, this opening up a nice eve gap. The trick was to go slowly so I didn’t start cutting into the hinges. I followed the hacksaw blade up with some of my heavy-duty sandpaper, which was better suited to selectively sanding the actual fiberglass instead of the hinges.
The results are kind of hard to capture on camera, but I gave it a try anyway:
Eventually there was nothing to do but get back to working on that pesky spinner gap. I’ve been gradually opening this up by using a strip of sandpaper glued to a piece of aluminum. Working it between the spinner and cowl applies a little pressure to take material off the cowl, and as the gap opened and the pressure slacked off, I’d add strips of packing tape to the aluminum, This allowed me to gradually open up the gap until things started to even up.
Here again, it was pretty tedious work, but eventually I decided I was satisfied with the gap:
Next, I pulled the upper cowl off and started working on blending all that micro into the existing cowl profile. As usual for micro, there was a lot of extra material here to sand off, but at least it was mostly easy to blend the transition. The only exceptions were where the cooling inlets join the prop spinner, making for some compound curves.
I still need to work on rounding the corners here – the spinner face is flat, the transition areas are flat, but they join at a sharp angle. I’ve also got a fair number of voids and pinholes that will need to be filled, and I think I want to add some micro on the inner portion of the spinner ring as well. But before I do any of that, I want to get that corner rounded, since there’s a good chance that’ll expose some more voids.
