Lower cowl and gear leg fairings

I have been working on the lower cowl and gear leg fairings over the last couple weeks.   Finally got them to a point where I am happy with how things are working/flying.   At first the gear leg fairings affected my trim a bit and the Slip/Skid ball was about ½ off.   I simplify adjusted the gear leg fairings and after two flights of adjustment by trim was dead on.   Not sure why people are so concerned about these, or why they add tabs to their rudder.  A simple minor adjustment on the gear leg fairings straightens things out perfectly.   Anyway, I will probably do some more minor tweaking and fiberglass work/priming then call these done for the summer.

Breakfast flight and Gear Fairings

Bekah and I took our first airplane trip together (sort of) this weekend.   She actually flew with friends since I am not up to my 40 hours yet, but we flew in loose formation, so were able to see each other from the air.   In fact they snapped a pretty good pic of me from the air that you can see here.  It sure was fun to fly over to Pt. Townsend for breakfast and have Bekah there on a perfect weather day.

I have been flying off my 40 hours as quick as I can.  At this point I am up to 30.3 which means less than 10 hours and Bekah can fly with me.  Weather isn't supposed to be great this week so I decided to get into my gear fairings.  Turns out they are just like everything else and harder than I thought.  After about 5 hours I have them mounted, but still much more to do with them.  Tricky part is you have to jack the plane up so that there is no weight on the gear.  Then somehow make them straight with the center line of the plan.  There is no real spot to measure from on the fairing, so it’s just kind of do the best you can with plumb lines down the fuse.   I drilled a few extra holes in the fairings as I zeroed in on the best spot to fix them to their supports, so I will need to patch those as I continue to fit and drill them.