Main leg fairings installed
Went down to the hangar early to work on the wheel fairings and get them fixed up. It was something like the 6th cruddy weather weekend in a row, so I figured there wouldn’t be much flying to do. Summer has got to start soon.
I used the cut off wheel in the Dremel to increase the size of the openings for the tires by 1/8-1/4″ in the areas that were too tight. I’ll probably increase them even more in a couple spots. I’m shooting for about 1/2″ clearance, especially at the back of the tire where any contact would cause the fairing to catch and fold inward. I also made cuts through the spots where the fiberglass cracked.
I had just enough fiberglass material left (ordered more from Spruce) to lay up some patches on the inside of the fairings after thoroughly sanding and cleaning the areas. I used some tape and clamps/wood blocks to hold the broken areas in alignment. The whole process went very quickly.
While that was setting up, I worked on the leg fairings. I installed them loosely and jacked up the plane to a level attitude. I wrapped a line around the fairing and tied it to my step ladder toward the back of the plane. Using a water level (just water in some plastic tubing), I made sure the line was level front to back. I then dropped plumb bobs from the center of the plane, front and back, and made sure the line was parallel to the centerline of the plane. I wrapped a tiny bit of safety wire around the line to pull it closer together and centered the fairing based on that. Took longer to explain than to do it. It ended up being very simple compared to some elaborate schemes I’ve heard of.
The wind was again very swirly, but I wanted to test out the leg fairings. To get a real accurate measurement I should have flown the same day with the fairings off. Instead I just tried to duplicate the conditions of my test flights on Wednesday. Based on that, it seems the main leg fairings alone added about 6 knots of speed. Not bad.
The flying wasn’t so great with ominous clouds everywhere and light turbulence, so I kept the flight short. The controller was very helpful calling out the current winds. They varied minute by minute from dead calm, to straight down the runway, to 8 knot crosswind. I semi-unintentionally stayed high on the approach. I was at 1000′ right up to where the Cessnas normally turn base to final. I pulled power, waited for the white arc, dropped flaps, and she lost altitude very quickly. The flare was perfect. Everything was looking really good until right before touch down the winds changed. The plane popped up and then dropped in to a bigger thud than I would like, but I kept the nosewheel off this time.
By the time I got back, the epoxy on the wheel fairings had set up. I removed the clamps and peel ply and was very pleasantly surprised at the result. A little filler and they will be literally as good as new. I just need to clean up the tire openings a little bit with the drum sander in the Dremel.
