Cowling repairs

I've been working my way slowly toward the front of the Cub and completion of this project. This week I have been working on the final cowl fitting. Here is a shot of the cowl pieces as received with the project.

It came with a Wag Aero cowl with a fiberglass nose bowl. The top was really not too bad but the bottom was really hacked up. My friend Scott came through with an original top cowl left over from his project. It needed some minor repairs but was all metal and a properly repaired metal cowl beats a perfect fiberglass cowl any day. When I went to the Gordon Fischer auction last year I bought a metal nose bowl for $5 . Now I had a complete cowl, I just needed to fit it all together. Here is the nose bowl.

I did not really have the right dies for the planishing hammer but managed to to smooth this out a little.

  It will take a few patches but like I said before, repaired metal beats fiberglass. This week I've been working on the top and bottom sections. The first thing I had to do was strip the new top section before any repairs could be completed. I had finally run out of this crappy stripper I had bought at the Lowes, it was more like a gel and dried really fast. So this time I splurged and spent $30 for a gallon of this stuff.

This is the real stuff ! You can feel it starting to burn through two pairs of gloves ! If your looking to go green , do not buy this. If you want to remove paint , this is the shit! Here is the new top cowl after one coat.

There were 4 areas that needed repair on the top, 2 worn pin locations, a small hole and a small crack. The right front side pin hole was worn, I made a internal patch from 032 and riveted it inside. The grommet will cover most of the old ugly hole.

The front pin on the right side had a previous repair, for some reason they used really big round head rivets. I made a new patch piece and installed it with some flush rivets. Once again the grommet and a little JB weld will cover this completely.

On the left side there was a triangular hole worn through near the rear pin location. I cut this out round and fitted a flush patch. It came out pretty good but will show through the paint.

  Finally , there was a small crack starting on the top aft edge where it wears against the boot cowl. I made a reinforcement plate and flush riveted it on the inside.

I had planned to install an F&M oil filter kit and this would had required a large hole in this side to clear the filter. Here is the location marked before I stripped the top. I just don't like the big hole so for now I will just go with the original Continental screen.

You can see the hole I patched at the rear pin location. I did not bother with the the little missing piece forward of the exhaust pipe because the pipe covers this area. Getting late , bottom repairs tomorrow.