Cowl repairs

Today I finished the repairs on the Trojan cowl, she now looks more like a battleship than an airplane ! For some reason all the Trojans I've seen have some kind of distress in this area. This was not too bad until the old inside patch started to crack. Someone made this from soft aluminum. My patch is from 2024T3 0.025 thick. I would have used 0.032 but I loaned my sheet to someone and I guess it did not get home yet. I really need to replace this whole section, but this is my flying airplane. Here is the new patch.

As you can see , I have stop drilled this crack several times. Must be some kind of vibration thing. I cut  out the cracked half of the old patch and increased the area of the doubler.

Well he's starting to look like an old battleship, but I don't think the Trojan cares as long as it's still flying. I will put this on tomorrow, supposed to be a nice cool day for a change.

Saturday I hope to attend the Chili flyin at Hood field, then Sunday will be back to work on the Cub. To my California readers PLEASE vote YES to prop 19.