Big session today. I managed to trim the bottom cowling totally -Trimmed the aft vertical sides of the cowl -Cut hinges to go on those vertical sides and drilled and cleco'd to the fuselage -Once I had the vertical sides trimmed and fitted to my satisfaction I layed out the rivet locations and match-drilled. -Layed out using a laser level the horizontal joint between the upper and lower cowl -Cut the lower cowling and did many many trimming/sanding 'adjustments' to get all the seams and the cowl ailignment to my satisfaction. I still need to put in the horizontal joint hinge and rivet the vertical hinges to the firewall and then rivet all the hinges (and bond) to the cowling itself. Lot more work to do, but some really hard steps are now behind me. Also, this session put me past 1600 hrs total time on the build (not counting research). 3 yrs and 10 months since I started.
Trimming the aft vertical edge of the bottom cowl
Laser level helped me mark where to trim the lower cowl that is overlapping the upper cowl presently