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Engine Update January 2009 Updates January 11, 2009 More Cowling Work.... - 7.0 hrs Today I arrived at 9:30 and fired up the heater. Jon was right behind me and I wiped down the previous marks on the cam strips with laq thinner except for the center one. Jon started using his magic divider and we agreed on the spacing. Next we decided if we mounted the side strips that should stiffen it up enough to show us what else to trim off the back edge to get a good fit. We started fitting the first side strip and that is where the problem started. After I cut the strips to fit I marked them with the cam template. I dont remember why but we ended up turning the strips over and drilling the rivet line with the same rivet spacing as the sides of the firewall. So far so good. Got both strips in place and we reinstalled the bottom cowl. Then the S%#@ hit the fan. The side strips seem to cause the sides to overlap. We worked and worked on that until we decided we would need to scallop the edges to get things to fit correctly. So we remove the bottom cowl and marked up the strip and started cutting. Once we finished we removed the other side strip and marked it up and Jon started to trim that one while I reinstalled the first side. As I installed it I noticed there was not enough metal above the edge of the bottom cowl to mount the camlock. This was because we flipped the strip over. I have know idea why I thought that would work after I used the template to mark the like to begin with. So we had to start over again. We sure got faster the second time. I think we got both strips cut from scratch marked and trimed in less time than we did everything else. We reinstalled and these strips are working much better. They are thinner aluminum and after being scalloped I was able to use the seamer to bend the tabs enough to follow the bend of the side cowl. At this point it was getting late so it was a good stopping point. This website was built to document my work in compliance with the FAA requirements needed to certify my aircraft. My experiences and comments are by no means to be considered as instructions on how to build any aircraft.