Wheel fairings
I went down to the hangar Saturday and worked on the wheel fairings. The weather was miserable, so I didn’t even entertain the idea of flying.
First thing I did was take a look at the nosewheel. I’ve been noticing some black stuff oozing out of one side and the wheel is still pretty stiff. I removed the whole wheel and checked out the bearing, which looked fine. I re-greased the seals and re-installed. We’ll see if that fixes things.
I jacked up the plane to level the longerons, trimmed the fairings a bunch until they fit over the tires and gear legs, and spent a bunch of time aligning them to the centerline of the plane and making them level per the recommended orientation on the plans. After all of that, I finally drilled the fairings to the brackets. It would be nice if the two fairings were remotely similar to each other. The right side fits pretty good. The left side seems to be about 1/4″ too wide.
I went back down late on Sunday and laid up some fiberglass reinforcement patches where the inside brackets attach. I put a extra few layers on the left fairing in hopes of taking up some of that 1/4″ gap.
I even managed to fly a tiny bit. The weather looked decent, but a bit gusty. By the time I took off, the gusts were increasing. I flew around for about 20 minutes and decided it wasn’t fun flying weather. When I came back in the wind was worse, 20 to 70° across the runway gusting 10-18 knots. A bit over my personal comfort level, but the runway at Renton is long and wide. I had no problem keeping the plane aligned with the centerline, but the plane dropped in a bit harder than I like. I was trying to keep some extra speed on short final, but I think the slip stole some of that away. Next time I’ll keep even more speed on final. Still a fun flight. Even nasty weather is fun in a little rocket.
Almost forgot that I figured out the source of the whistle in my cockpit. It’s coming from the small gap between the canopy and rear window. I put some tape over the gap and the whistle was entirely gone. Much, much, much more pleasant in the cockpit. Time to order some aluminum for a “targa” style strip across the back of the canopy.