Cowl fittings – lower

Admission time …. I fitted the top cowl and trimmed to the best fit I could but then had my son Ben visit from Oxford so took the opportunity to have another pair of skilled hands help me get the lower cowl into position …

It was only then that I realised I had over cut the top cowl and would have been better (certainly with the Jab engine) starting with the bottom. The TLAC indicated cut areas on the lower cowl were spot on and only need a little more widening to take account of the larger fins on my Jabiru.

 

I then put 4 cleco’s in position and it was held like a rock … I could then see that my trimming of the top was not going to work.

I have a couple of options which are being actively reviewed.

1) Buy a new top – pretty expensive and we don’t have January sales in these items !! 😦

2) Run a backing strip of carbon fibre/glass and re-edge the area I have cut

Option 2 looks like a viable option so we are going to try that first .. with option 1 as an obvious fallback.

The plan is to get some slim F1 styled scoops (the sort they have just above and behind the drivers head) to act as extra scoops for air but also have a matched pair (one for each side for ‘visual’ balance) to hide the protruding heads.

Watch this space and we will see how the repair goes !

1 May 2020 – very late update .. as I saw someone had been looking at this post recently … well.. option 2 seemed a non starter as ‘why spoil the whole thing for a ‘hapeth of tar’ as they used to say … probably when ships were being built up North !
so .. I paid up and bought new … but … could never bring myself to throw the original .. so it stayed in the back of the barn for years … then .. much later .. I dragged it out .. cut some aircraft alloy strips and riveted in place .. this gave me the increased ‘depth’ back and then had fun aligning drill holes for the fixing bolts

This gave me the option to use either cowl … so I painted up the old (white) one with black stripes … added some poppies and got it ready to celebrate D day invasion landings in July 2019.

I have now just added a number 7 and a 5 to celebrate the 75th year since Jersey was liberated post WWII .. along with some hand painted figures