I don't want any air leaking into the cockpit, or at least the minimum I can accept. Its not a pressurised plane after all. My thinking is that if the air from under the plane is blocked in the most convenient places then thats all good. As you can see in pic 2 the nose gear pivot, NG6 is open air with the gear down and probably a good leak source gear up.
It took me a lot of thought to come up with this simple cover. One thing is that I want full access to NG6 because it has thin washes at the side that are really hard to fit. If I ever have to get in here, it should be easy. The next issue was that I wanted screws at the top as its really hard to get a screw driver to the side at this area of the nose. Oh...and I want air circulating around the light so it doesn't overheat..otherwise I could have boxed the whole thing in.
Then the next issue was that I wanted to make the NG6 area stronger as I was happily cutting it away to fit the head light mount. I had a bit of foam already covered in glass and fitted as you see in pic 3 makes this whole area a lot more rigid.
It turned out to be a crazy amount of work making the aluminium supports, drilling them out, alodine and then the nut plates and floxing in place. The holes in pic 1 are for keying the flox as well as weight reduction.
You can see it fitted in pic 3 and while there is a small gap top and bottom it is really sealed with flox and the support given NG31 was not perfectly flat. It's very tight on the sides but you can still get the cover out. Of yeah I made hard points in the cover by digging a hole and filling with flox. This is where I drilled for the screws and then counter sunk. Overkill eh?
