Cowling Fitting
Over the last two days I spent more time on the engine cowling. I attached the inspection doors and prepped the top half to attach the louver vent. Then I began installing camloc fasteners for securing the cowling to the mounting strip on the firewall.
On the starboard side, there is a large air scoop for the charge air cooler. The original locations for the clecos (which were based on the 284mm spacing in the build manual) put the clecos right in a spot where they would interfere with the scoop. Part 2 of the Sling Build videos for the cowling suggests adding one more cleco to each side of the cowling, which helped with the interference, but I found the cowling fits nicely if I placed camlocs straddling the air scoop instead. So where you see green tape in the next picture, I’ll be repairing those holes with filler.
Attaching the inspection doors was pretty straightforward. The composite doors were a bit oversized but fit well after sanding down the excess material.
Next I attached the louver to the top cowling. I was surprised that the existing cutout on the cowling needed quite a bit of finessing for the stamped metal part to fit right. The pre-cut hole was neither the right size nor straight.
Next I worked on the camlocs that attach the top and bottom halves of the cowling. First I enlarged the pilot holes in the cowling to 1/4″. I created a simple tool on the 3d printer to insert into the 1/4″ hole which locates the rivet holes at 1″ spacing for attaching the back piece of the camloc.
The port side had a weird curved lip on the joggle, making the top half stick out around 5mm. I had to cut down a bit of the joggle and sand it down, it’s much better now only sticking out around 2mm.
