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Tue 06 December 2005

Half day with other gardening first thing. Continuing with the cowl we removed a little more of the top rear edge to bring the whole cowl aft slightly. Then lots of re-fitting / testing and re-reading.

After more thought - I realised the source of my confusion - the written instruction say spinner 1/8 - 3/16" BELOW the cowl - the drawing shows 1/8" for the cowl ABOVE the spinner. What I had done previously was make the spinner backing plate 1/8" below the cowl. The result is I didn't take the spinner material into account during the initial fitting (BAD), but we don't need to raise the cowl by the amount I thought we had to (GOOD).

Then I realised the trimming I did this morning was probably the bit that was 'too much' and NOW I did have a problem! (BAD).


The next step is get the two halves sorted and together then we can move the cowl fore/aft to a suitable place and go from there. Dad match drilled the remaining locations on the hinges to the cowls and I countersunk them.
Then it was mix up a batch of resin / silca and glue & rivet the hinges to the upper cowl. Like most things, it gets better with practice - we used a similar approach as pro-seal joints - a bit between each rivet and a bead 'top & bottom' - this reduces the amount of excess on the rivets for the squeezer to get messy with and provides a simple bedding compound. The 'upper' edge was then filleted for a smoother finish.
The casualty for the day was the ball-bearing micro-stop. As I was preping the cowl the opposite side pushed the drill / micro-stop off the bench onto the concrete floor. The micro-stop shaft lost and got bent.
This is the contents of a micro-stop - hopefully we can sort / fix / remake the core shaft - we will see.
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