Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Fiberglass Projects (5)

5 hours

I still have the cowl and wheel pants at home, and there were a few little jobs I wanted to get done before taking them to the airport.

On the upper cowl, I still needed to add some kind of air exit for the turbo cooler.  I went with these two little NACA vents from Aircraft Spruce.  I just mounted them backwards so they don't act like scoops in flight.






I glued them to the inside of the cowl with JB Weld plastic epoxy.





After a bunch of trimming, sanding, a little filler, and more sanding, they look decent enough.


I also finally filled the holes I drilled way back when I initially fit the cowl to the prop hub.


This is the filler I used.  It's like Bondo except it weighs almost nothing!



I have read that it helps engine cooling to smooth out the air inlet on the front of the cowl.  I already had the filler out so I figured I might as well try to improve these inlets while I was at it.  It ended up taking three applications with a bunch of sanding in between, but now the inlets have nice little ramps instead of abrupt entrances.










I also used some filler to smoothen the parting lines on the wheel pants, and cover the couple erroneous holes I drilled when I fit them to the landing gear.



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