The cowling has had pilot drilled hinges held on by clecos for a while now. It was time to updrill and rivet. I updrilled from the pilot #40 hole to the rivet sized #30 (about 1/8"). An important step I performed was sealing the fiberglass. After the holes were updrilled and carefully deburred, I dropped just a little bit of super glue into the hole to wick into the fiberglass and help prevent deterioration of the hole.
With the holes updrilled all that remained was to rivet the hinges on. The cowling looks so much cleaner now that it doesn't have 30 odd clecos hanging off, ready to catch on something at any time.
I also worked on my side panels for the cockpit interior. These started life as scraps of cardboard tapes together load a crude template but we're refined until I had perfect patterns. Once I had reliable patterns I cut them out from corrugated plastic.
I played with what I wanted to the designs to look like and eventually settled on some pocket locations and a stripe that falls in the shadow of my tilt back canopy arms.
This is a big part of my color design philosophy is to accentuate the features rather than trying to hide them. In this case I am highlighting the shape of the canopy pivot arms .
Obviously these haven't been attatched with spray adhesive yet but I snapped some pictures of a rough installation.
The next steps are to glue the fabric to the side panels, to fabricate the joiner tab between the two cowling halves for the southco, and to continue sanding and blending the fusion of cowling and blister