There's been a flurry of activity in the factory to end 2012...let's see if I can get you caught up on this last day before we flip the calendar to 2013. First order of business was continuing my cowling work, I tackled the aluminum air inlet inserts. The top two are formed in place with "flox". I suppose you could permanently attach the lower halves, but you must...for obvious reasons, make the top cowl removable. I made these two inlets removable...both top and bottom.
The idea is to put them in place, pour a fairly wet mix of flox into the cavity and let it form around the groove in the alum inlet. Sound simple enough...right? I had to make two attempts to get it right...it turns out to be a little trickier than first imagined.
This first pic just shows my initial fitting of the rings...I just wanted to do a sanity check that everything looked good before removing the cowling and starting to bond things in place.
My Ram Air unit is lining up nicely now...I emailed Rod and he set me straight, one of the spacers had a 3 deg offset machined into it...and I had it backwards. After flipping it around...all looks good. But for now, I'm not messing with this inlet ring.
A shot of how the bottom cowling surgery turned out...although, I've already shown this previously.
I added a "lip" to the bottom cowling...and here you can see one of the two screws that will fasten the two halves together right next to the spinner.
I wanted to be able to split the two halves once I poured my flox into the grooves. The question is how? Well, use that modeling clay you bought...you did buy some modeling clay right? This really worked well (the second time...when I did a better job with it...the first time resulted in me not getting it all the way across and having to break apart the two halves and start over!!)
By the way, at this point in the build I am pretty much doing my own thing... I have really not looked at any other blogs for awhile. I kind of enjoy figuring this stuff out on my own at this point...so, these tricks/tips are just what I've come up with...they may have been done by others, but I wouldn't know. So, that is just a disclaimer...these tactics may or may not be the best way to do this so make your own judgements.
I wanted the rings to be in line with the face of the spinner surface...so I came up with the idea of just putting the cowling face down on a flat surface and then using gravity to let the flox fill in the slots. Here you can see my flox on one half and also the modeling clay being used as a "dam" or break point. Later I filled in the other side.
And I forgot to mention, don't forget to use some kind of mold release on the alum ring if you don't want it permanently molded in place. I used my hair spray again...but car wax supposedly works well too.
The next day, with some coaxing, I popped the two halves together. Worked out pretty well. Those rings are not going anywhere...its a tight fit. The next task was to mix up some micro balloons (white stuff) and do some finish work. This will take a couple iterations, but this is the the start of the process.
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