Well, since we have a rough cowl, now we have to trim and mount it. Trimming was accomplished pretty easily with a tin snips for rough trimming and then sanding to my trim lines.
Bonding areas for the mounting flanges along the wings were prep sanded and the cowl was then jigged in place using the Popsicle stick method. The cowl was protected with gray fibrous threads (aka duct tape) as a mold release for the flange. Five ply BID layups were wet out on plastic and then transferred onto the wing roots overlapping onto the cowl.
These flanges were trimmed and sanded to width and corners rounded. As you can see I used peel ply on the top on the flange in preparation for the next layup.
Next was laying out the flange fastener locations. I laid these out to be evenly spaced, and .6 inches from the edge of the cowl, which was the flange centerline. Note to self, that fan rivet spacing tool would be nice to have. Once clecoed in place it was looking pretty good. I didn’t get any photos of that, but I will get some for the next post.
The next tasks will include the fixed parts of the cylinder bumps that are over top of the strake and modifying the turtle back to flow into the cowl. So in preparation, I put some cardboard dams up and added pour foam. Proof that beer IS required to build an airplane!
the Garaggio 