This weeks goal is to get the cowl final fit and ready for paint. I cut the hinge pins for the upper aft hinges too short so there's not enough of the pins sticking up to grasp with pliers for insertion and removal. So I ordered some replacements from ACS. And spent the morning tapering the ends of them using a grinding wheel and the scotchbrite wheel. A lot of little detailed doctoring by inspecting where they were binding and then figuring how to remove/relieve the binds. The new pins are still a firm fit, but they go in and out with just hand presure now instead of the 'encourager' Nest step was to finalize the horizontal gap between top and bottom cowls halves. Van's plans say to finish it to betweem .020 and .032" I put some duct tape on the sides and then used a feeler gauge to measure how big/little the gap was and noted it on the duct tape. Then removed the upper cowl and used the vixen file to file those places where it was high. It took lots of on and off iterations, but I got both sides to bewteen .027 and .030". The Lower cowl was projecting outward slightly on both sides. Took the cowl off and using the seamers I slightly bent the hinge eyes on the lower cowl outward slightly. (did 3 @ a time) The 2 sides now match flush (Dont' know why they weren't flush after installation. must have gotten more proseal on the lower hinges than the upper.) The cowl is NOT flush with the firewall and fwd fuse skins, . So I will need to use some filler to fair/blend the 2 items together.
