Moving on to the upper cowl! This piece will pretty much serve as the hood of the plane, ideally being easy to remove and install for minor maintenance things like adding oil, etc.
I found it initially real tricky to weasel the upper cowl into place. Pretty much all of the trimming and sanding I had to do was around the prop hub and air inlet areas, but once I got those forward sections to fit together the whole upper cowl fit into place.
One small interference I found once the cowl finally dropped all the way in was the flange on the top forward edge of the oil cooler. You can see in the picture above how the seam between the upper and lower halves isn't quite closed at the front; it's because the cowl was resting on that flange. I cut it off with a dremel tool and then it fit nicely.
Next I began drilling all the holes for the fasteners. The sides were easy.
The top, where the cowl slides under the windshield skirt, was less easy. There's not really a good way to hold the cowl tight against the flange to drill them together. I found I could use my big jack handle to press the cowl up in some areas, but not all of it.
Eventually I got it all drilled together, except the center. The windshield skirt is just slightly larger than the cowl, so all the extra material is bunched up in the center. The cowl itself is also sagging there since there's nothing to hold it up yet, so the flange and cowl really need to meet in the middle. I'll have to figure out a way to fix this!
There are also a couple other much smaller bulges at the corners but I'm less concerned about those and I think I can tighten them up a bit before I call it done.
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