Yesterday & today I spent quite a few hours trying to get the new cowls to fit without success. The new lower cowl was modified at the factory to fill the gap where normally the nose wheel leg passes. There are quite a few deficiencies in the way that was done, far too much area was covered with extra fibreglass & too much of that fibreglass has increased the thickness in the area from 1 mm to 3 - 4 mm making it totally inflexible & heavy ( it's 1kg heavier than the old cowl ) and worst of all, instead of being flat across the bottom, it's internally convex, reducing the muffler clearance to almost zero. There is simply too much reworking required using skills I don't possess to make it worthwhile pursuing fitment of the new lower cowl any further. I've also investigated using the new top cowl & the old bottom cowl but the joggles at the nose ring are vastly different, again requiring major rework to make fit. One more issue is the reinforcing doublers now used internally around the inspection door openings overlap the firewall mounting strips, that would require either significant bending of those strips or sanding the reinforcing back & applying some fibreglass to seal the area.
It's back to using the original cowls that are very rough in their finish and will result in a slightly wider gap with the spinner than I would like as I initially made the mistake of trimming the top cowl without having the bottom cowl attached resulting in the top cowl on the right side being 3mm shorter than desired.
