Tom Emery just happened to be driving by the hangar this morning as I was out dumping the trash, so I roped him into checking out my brake bleeding setup. He said he has the same little POS oil can from Harbor Freight. So what gives? For whatever reason, yesterday the process wasn't working. Well, of course Tom steps in the hangar and the thing just decides to start working. He's moving in a few months, so I told him that at annual time, if it doesn't work again, I'll send him an airline ticket...Tom is the man. So as you can see here we've got fluid.
The whole "bib" and "displacement" crap is totally unnecessary. All you gotta do is just pump fluid until it goes into the reservoir, and you're done. You don't need to fill the reservoir while pumping from the caliper. Once fluid has entered the reservoir from both brake lines, just top it off at the reservoir. No muss no fuss. Anyway, this little $3.99 oil can worked great...TODAY.
Next on my short checklist is to wrap up the cowl aesthetics. Up until now, the hinge pins on the sides just poked out a little tiny slit I made in the front corners. I've been wavering for MONTHS about how to secure the hinge pins. Part of me wanted to go with a totally invisible setup, i.e. the pull-from-behind design. In that setup, you route the pins into the cockpit and pull them aft to remove the top cowl. Lots of people have gone that route, and there's definitely no substitute aesthetically, since nothing is visible at the front of the cowl. But it sure is a lot more work and complexity, with tube guides, firewall penetration, etc. And it's more work each time you want to remove & replace the cowl, since you have to get in the plane to do it. I like being up front where I can thump and push the cowl around if I need to in order to align the hinges better and stuff. So I'm willing to sacrifice aesthetics slightly for functionality.
In the plans, the method called out is to take one eyelet from a piece of hinge, bend the end of the pin 90 degrees, and screw the hinge eyelet to the cowl. Very, very easy. Not very pretty.
Another method that I've seen a lot of people use is to take a piece of aluminum or steel or whatever, and make a little cover plate over the corner. The benefit there is that it screws into both the top and bottom cowls, acting as reinforcement to keep the halves from separating vertically. And it allows you to chop a decent-sized hole there for pin access. I had pretty much gravitated toward that method. Problem is, a lot of the metal cover plates I've seen have a kind of denty, hammered look. The curve at the nose of the cowl is compound, obviously, and it's hard to get metal to conform. But hey, fiberglass is king in this shop these days...so let's go composite!
I teflon taped the corners of the cowl.
I laid up four plies of 8oz cloth with one finish ply of 3oz cloth. That provided enough thickness so I could countersink the screw holes. You'll see. Here it is just after the layup was made on the left.
And the right. Looks ugly now, but you'll see where I'm going with this (if it's not obvious already).
