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Later in the morning Rob showed up to the party and began working on the Skybolt fasteners. The final thing to be done was enlarge the cleco holes to the Skybolt socket size and install the nutplates for the front cowl . Rob started with the nutplates. Rick had turned me on to some really nice dimpled screw washers that work great and look fantastic on the inlet area. Rob got all the holes done on the upper and lower cowls. The sockets were put on the fuse already before we even moved it to the hangar.

We put the cowl halves on. The bottom was done first and we adjusted the fasteners to where they needed to be. All went well although a couple could use a little more adjusting. We moved to the top cowl and were having some problems. It seemed like some of the Skybolts were locking in the socket before they were adjusted completely. Long story short, the little plastic anti-lock devices that are supposed to keep them from locking.....fell out. They are little plastic pins and being the top cowl they got loose and fell out.......they were all over the floor!!! We also had a problem with the barrel portion turning freely on a number of them....they had chips and burrs. We cleaned them all and the process worked perfectly after that.

The final act was to bleed the brakes. I bought a reverse brake bleeder on Amazon and it worked great for filling and bleeding the brakes. We back filled the reservoir while filling the brake lines.

Once again thanks to Rob for coming and being a big help and sweating it out with me!!!

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