Brief Description: Installing the Fiberglass Spinner
I am extremely fortunate to be able use my hangar-mate’s RV-14 Installation manual to fit and cut my spinner. However, there are many steps in the RV-14 kit process which VANs already did on the RV-14 kit which are not done in the RV-7A kit…like scribe all the spinner cutouts around the blades of a constant speed propeller, predrill all the center locations for platenuts on both the front and aft hubs, and mark and measure where the squirrely little back plates should be located on the spinner. So here goes…the first thing I did was to create a propeller blade cutout template by carefully placing paper over the spinner cutout holes of my friend’s RV-14. His constant speed propeller is also made by Hartzell, but the blades are slightly wider at the base of the hub. I took this into account and made my template slightly smaller in the areas that varied between my propeller and his. I asked my wife to help me make these templates and even though she is very experienced with sewing patterns, it still took us nearly 3 hours to make templates (1st Pic). I used the template to mark one side of the spinner (2nd Pic), then marked the center of the cutout by measuring the width of the cutout and dividing it by 2. Then I placed the spinner on my worktable and stretched a string all the way around the base until I reached the centerline mark on the cutout (3rd Pic).
