Panel Cover - Part 3

With blog will cover modifications to the instrument cowl. 

Modification
One item that I did not warm to was the ears on the panel cowl for the air vents, so it was decided to modify the cowl to match the current Tucano LSA..

The existing comb had two 3.2 mm hole drilled in each mounting flange with mating holes into a scrap piece of 12 mm ply to keep the panel in shape after removing the ears.

A motor tool was use to remove both ears and a drum sander chamfered the edges to ensure a good bond to the new fiberglass.

The gap's were filled from the underside using some scrap 0.016'' aluminium sheet with the plastic still on the faces secured by celco's to form the profile.

Ready to fiberglass mounted in the ply jig

Lengths of 100 mm x 4 oz cloth tape were cut to provide three [3] layers. West Systems 105 Epoxy and slow cure resin were mixed and applied with a small brush, finally peel cloth was applied to the final layer and excess resin removed. 

After drying the peel cloth was removed along with the scrap fiberglass. 

The top side was sanded with a rotary sander with 120 grit paper to blend the new fiberglass.

Fiberglass and peel cloth curing

A batch of macro was mixed using resin with micro balloons and applied to the new area. When dry the profile was sanded using 120 grit paper in a electric sander blending in the new areas with the original cowl cover. 

This was repeated to obtain the final profile.

Finally the upper side was primed and sanded with 320 grit paper then spot filled using blade putty, sanded re-primed and sanded for painting.

Fitting modified cowl

The cowl was installed onto the mounting angles installed previously, after match drilling 4 [four] holes and trial fitting M4 rivet nuts were installed and cowl secured.

Comment
The new LAS Tucano Sports has a cowl that is the same as this visually.