With the weather not so hot today - no canopy work. Continuing with the prop - got it mounted OK.
Trying the cowl on for the first time with the real spinner location plus the lower hinge riveted to the fuselage things didn't look so good.
The gap is between 5/32 and 3/16 which is within tolerances.
But it looks like the (upper) cowl is about 3/8" too low.
This is the side view, the front surface of the cowl halves are close to 'planar' but needs a bit of tweaking, the gap is OK - bearing in mind the engine / prop will drop in time and the cowl won't move (much). The problem is the difference in the top of the spinner plate vs the top of the upper cowl.
To assist with the cowl work - we removed the baffles as they were just getting in the way, and re-cleco'd the forward upper fuselage skin to make sure everything was held tight at the aft end of the cowls.
This is the front surface laying on a table reference, the gap is about 1/16" (not much) but enough to look wrong.
This is somewhere close to where the upper cowl should be....
However this leaves some nasty gaps at the rear / sides of the lower cowl in particular.
The next stage is really to get the spinner fitted (or at least roughly) and then revisit the cowls - Dad started on the layout / getting two opposite points on the spinner.
I continued to wrestle with the spacing / alignment. I made an 1/8" spacer and blocks for the lower position of the top cowl, this just showed more problems (partly with the basic moulding).
This is the other side from the above photo - one side is good - the other isn't - not a good look....
All in all not a great day - prop has been mounted but cowl is going to need a lot of work. I'm rather down beat about it - I'm sure we will sort it all but I'm disappointed that we have such significant problems. I'm not sure what went wrong (if anything specifically), a day of lots of thinking / puzzling / discussing, but little progress or solutions - time for a beer!
