Starting on gear leg fairings and wheel pants

6 hours.

My pre-molded intersection fairings arrived from Van’s this week, but of course I forgot to take them up to the hangar.    The last major bit of fiberglassery is the landing gear stuff, so I tried to get started on that today.   There’s a .063 plate that bolts on to the brake caliper and its job is to hold the two halves of the wheel pants together, on each wheel.   I made them, cut all the spacers, and installed them, then took them off, anticipating that I could just put them  back on as needed. But it’s impossible to access the bolt head on the inside of the brake caliper without taking the wheel off.   I made two attempts to bend a 7/16 wrench 90 degrees at the open end, one resulting in a broken wrench, the other a wrench with too wide a bend to fit inside the rim and access the bolt.

So I figured taking the wheel off would be the best option.  I searched the hangar in vain for a floor jack.   Those guys don’t have one.   The engine hoist I used before is down in the EAA hangar, but it was all locked up and I couldn’t get to it.   So that was out.

I did get the plans and the manual out so I could begin working on cutting the leg fairings to fit.    That didn’t take long, so I went up to the aviation department of O’Reilly Auto parts and picked up another tube of red RTV.   I finished the front baffle bead and the left mag duct, and also isolated a couple of things from chafing via the RTV Blob method.

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