Main Wheel Fairings Completed

The last step in completing the main wheel fairings was to match drill the rest of the screw holes along the circumference of the fairing halves. Three holes as a reference had already been drilled and provided with the corresponding nutplates. Now these nutplates should receive their screws and hole the assembly in place while match-drilling the rest of the holes.
That did not work so well early in the morning on Saturday as this little critter kept me away from the carport for a while.

A Western Diamondback! And I had almost overlooked it when I entered the carport from the back.

Hard to see between all those other hoses and cables. It was quite lively and slightly rattled to make me aware of my trespassing and so I retreated to some paperwork inside the house until our visitor had decided to move on.

Back to match-drilling. That was not so easy even without this critter, because the out hole was not reachable for a drill while maintaining the drill bit perpendicular to the surface. So I had to resort to some help in lifting that leg up a bit.

I assume that with all other holes being accessible and clecoed, I could have probably been ok by just assembling the halves off the wheel and drilling it. However, this way I was able to confirm that the jack adapter works very well.

The rest was business as usual. Countersinking and riveting nutplates, slightly underset because of the fiberglass.

That completed the main fairings.

The nose wheel fairing is a pretty different story, when it comes to how the two halves are combined. And prepping them was somewhat hard as the scribe lines were not very visible but it was imperative that you only sand it down to precisely the scribe lines.

They were so hard to see that I completely overlooked the cutout for the nose arm if it had not been for the plans pointing it out.

The Dremel wheel and sanding drum made this an easy job.

The two halves are joined with a metal backplate that has to get bent into shape to follow the form of the fairing. A spray can like Napa primer works great to make a perfect bend.

Again, three holes were drilled to allow for aligning the plate. This worked very well on the left side but the holes did not align so well on the right side. I decided to believe the metal to be correct and match drilled the fiberglass from the inside through the metal backplate as a template.

Because of this I decided to do all the match drilling from the inside in order to ensure the the rivet holes would not get elongated.

After connecting the two halves for a first trial fit it became apparent why you should be careful about just sanding down to the scribe line.

The way they are connected does not allow for some easy correctional sanding. If it is too much, a gap will show. The first fit shows that there is still quite some sanding to do before this is a nice fit.