I started fabricating one of the brackets that will be used to mount the air vents. These are fabricated out of 0.063″ stock which is the same as the instrument panel.
Here’s how it fits in the plane. You can see how it nestles nicely up against the instrument panel and the flange of the vent overlaps both. I’ll cut off the lower right of the bracket at the small horizontal black line and let the bracket follow the curve of the vent around to the bottom. I left the bracket a little tall on the left side for now since I had Classic Aero Designs fabricate the side panels to the original height of the vent brackets. I don’t know if they’ve cut these parts yet, so I’ll see if they can still change them. If so, I’ll cut this off straight.
I reinstalled the cowl so that I can continue the fitting. I had previously put this on hold while Van’s evaluated whether the flanges on the cowl sides were cut too short but haven’t gotten back to it until now.
I had previously cut the aft edge of the bottom cowl to length, so I carefully lined up the cowl all around and drilled a couple of holes on each side to the stainless steel hinge to lock the bottom in position.
I put a work light inside the cowl and marked the approximate cut line on the sides. It’s too late to run the cutoff wheel tonight, so this is a good place to stop.
