For once something went smoothly.
The cowl is something I have been afraid to tackle. If you screw it up its kind of permanent. So far though its been a breeze. The fiberglass work is excellent, the cowl halves fit snugly together straight out of the box. I suppose there are pinholes in it somewhere but I cant see or feel them.
I made up the required 1 dozen blind nuts on plywood pads. The kit comes with some 1/8" ply for this but I have never seen a blind nut that short! The ones I get from Ace are at least 1/4" deep so I had to use 1/4" pads. I don't know whats up with that but that's how it is.
I taped the cowl halves together and marked the locations for the holes. The hardware is 6-32 and I used a 1/8" drill bit to drill the holes with a cordless drill. Slow speed works best. You need to get something under the part so you can press on it, I had this piece of scrap 2x4.
The two forward blind nuts on each side had to be shaped slightly so when the screws are tightened the cowl doesn't deform. Before gluing I took everything apart to wash it. Then I put everything back together and taped it as well. For gluing I removed one screw at a time so that nothing could shift. The screws got dipped in Vaseline and the epoxy was applied to the pad. then it was reinstalled before moving on to the next one. Every 15 mins or so I checked that all the screws still moved just in case.
I also had time to make some tools. I had this aluminum I-Beam that I turned in to an edge truer. It looks like a level but Home Depot doesn't know what its for!
I put 120 Grit on one side and 220 on the other. Some scrap 2x4 with 120 grit paper is used for pushing the stock. Works great.
The next tool is a little block with a blade stuck to it, simple enough. This is for putting perpendicular notches in the end of bevel stock. The block was cut so that its perfectly square. This eliminates one of the most error prone parts of doing bevels; copying the center line mark from one side of the stock to the other. Really with a pen you line can be 1mm wide and if you are off by the line width on each face your off by 3mm on the other side. If you do that to two opposing surfaces then the accumulated error is 6mm. I think this was the source of a lot of my problems. If you get it wrong you cant see both sides of the part at once so you cant see how bad it is.
