More cowling

Only made  a little progress today, were having a little spring cold snap here and for some reason I just don't get out to the shop until after lunch? I started by installing everything  to see how it all fit after the repairs. I then marked the nose bowl for trimming around the carburetor air intake. This is normally really close on a Cub and when you install a Bracket air filter it almost always chafes on the edges. To preclude this I cut the opening so I had 1/2 inch clearance all the way around. I tried adding washers behind the engine mounts to change the thrust angle , but the air box is too close to the pivot point and it really made no difference. Here is is before, you can see that the box is really close to the right side.

Because the Bracket filter sticks out about an inch,  I trimmed the top edge to keep it from chafing . This also allowed me to clean up some existing cracks. After trimming I fitted it all up again.

Much better now with even clearance all the way around. Here are a couple shots of the cowl all assembled.

Before I can fit the repair/reinforcement patches to the nose bowl, I need to rivet it to the lower cowl. I  figured now was the best time to complete the final smoothing of the nose bowl. I spent about an hour between the planishing hammer and hammer/dolly. Since I'm not brave enough to try and anneal this, it only came out so smooth. I think with a little filler it will look OK. Here is the end result.

  I picked up this tool the other day at the Harbor Freight. I had to take it apart and adjust the spacing to match the existing corrugations on the cowl edge. Worked perfect to adjust the edge angle.

That's about it for today, tomorrow is supposed to be in the 30's with rain . I will probably spend the day curled up with this treasure I bought off Ebay!