{"id":812,"date":"2012-03-04T05:44:34","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T05:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/?p=812"},"modified":"2013-12-18T04:47:03","modified_gmt":"2013-12-18T04:47:03","slug":"cowl-fitting-6-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/?p=812","title":{"rendered":"Cowl Fitting 6, 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

13 hours.<\/p>\n

This counts last weekend as well, and I suck for not making the update then, but I had some pressing stuff going on. Anyway, more stuff happened on the cowl, mostly fitting, shaping, and the drilling of hinges.<\/p>\n

Before I get into all that, I’m going to post some photos from the last entry.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nTo rough in the landing gear cutouts, I had to use a piece of angle, where I marked the distance from the center of the airplane to the landing gear leg.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe idea was to transfer that measurement to the bottom cowl to mark the approximate place the landing gear cutouts needed to be.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nLike so. Although, the fiberglass flexes so much any measurement would have been approximate at best, so I left plenty of room for error. Fiberglass isn’t like metal, if you cut too much away, you can build it back up, but it’s a pain in the ass.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nRemember I said I did a lot of hinges? Here’s one almost done on the bottom cowl. This is a piece of piss. Cleco-clamp the hinge to the edge, drill 1″ holes along its length. Easy.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe side hinges weren’t too bad either.<\/p>\n

But the fun comes with you have to drill holes in the fiberglass on hinges it covers up. This is where the new pink cowl with its honeycomb structure help a lot. What I did (and I learned this from Bob Collins, thank you Bob!) What I did was put the cowl on, and fine tune the fit with some of that PVC tape I had lying around. It’s great stuff, super strong, and doesn’t have all those fibers like duct tape. Then I stuck a light up inside the cowl, pointing at the hinges, which I’d already drilled holes in.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nWith the light inside, the holes in the hinges light up the fiberglass and gave me a really good drill guide to complete the task. The first one sucks. You have to somehow hang on to it and make sure the drill goes in right, otherwise it can oval out the drill hole.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe desired result is Clecoes holding the hinges all the way up and down the line.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nMore or less like this.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe other fun bit is figuring out what to do with the hinge pin. I have to drill a slot for it to enter and exit the hinge, and I’ll have to conceal it later.<\/p>\n

Like an idiot, I didn’t cut out the oil door per the plans before starting the hinge fit. It didn’t seem to have any ill effect, but after the hinges were drilled, I took the cowl apart and cut out the hole for the oil door.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

But I didn’t get much past this part. It was Oscar night, and we in the movie biz make a big deal out of it. It’s also cool to have 5 friends nominated this year.<\/p>\n

This week was killer, so I got nothing done. But today was pretty solid.<\/p>\n

I didn’t get a super-early start today, because I took simba down to Marina Del Rey for his walk.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Today, I riveted the hinges to the cowl.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe blue light from outside on the pink cowl makes everything look like it was shot in a Miami disco in 1983.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nRiveting these was tedious and repetitive. Like these photos.<\/p>\n

But eventually all the rivets got done, so I started working on the inner flanges, which get platenuts riveted to them and the two halves screw together through them.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe smaller hole was the temporary one I used to hold the two haves together during fitting. it will get filled in when I go into fiberglass mode.<\/p>\n

And that’s it. tomorrow, I’ll probably work on cleaning up wiring so I can rivet on the forward deck skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 hours. This counts last weekend as well, and I suck for not making the update then, but I had some pressing stuff going on. Anyway, more stuff happened on the cowl, mostly fitting, shaping, and the drilling of hinges. Before I get into all that, I’m going to post some photos from the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[68,5],"tags":[57],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjohn.openbar.com\/airplane\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}