Planned on fitting bottom cowl but found a time consuming mistake. I had mismeasured the spacers for my spinner gap. I was off by nearly 1/4 inch! I didnt notice untill I tried to fit bottom cowl and could not fit in place without a big gap at firewall. I researched the problem this morn and found I didnt have the min 1/8 inch gap betwen cowl and spinner bulkplate as I thought I had. Spent good deal of time fixing the wooden plate used to secure cowl as well as cutting 1/4 inch off my spacers and then reattaching it and lineing up
Started the fit proces again by placing cowl in position and getting level and then screwing to the wood disc
Traced my firewall edge using the the 2 inch ref mark as before, Remove cowl, trim to line with dremmel, Sand with sanding block. Reinstall and check fit and then repeat 2 more times!
In the picture below the holes in cowl are the old ones. They ofcourse nolonger line up with the hinge below. The blue line drawn is the new center of hinge line that I haf measured when cowl was off. It doesnt look like it, but its 1/4 inch fwd of old holes and will provide the required gap at spinner now.
In order to reuse the hinge, I decided to off set the new rvit holes 45 dregees. Note the hash marks I made on blue line midway between old holes.
I didnt post pics of the rest because they turned out bad but I center punched all the new revit holes to be drilled and then drilled them to #40 and clecoed. I then made a mark marks for a 1/16 inch paint gap. That looks like a lot to me but it should allow for paint on firewall edge as well as the cowling edge.
I also spent time sanding the nose area for fit but not sure Im doing much good at this stage.
I will fill the holes of old rivits with epoxy when I get to installing the shims. I figure the goop will press up in those holes when I cleco the shims and hinge in place. It will also provide a bit more grip which is a good thing.
