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Building your cowling.
You can't start your cowl until you have your spinner installed and nose bowl cut to fit. If using the McCauley 2A34C203 prop, you'll want an early C182 spinner, from aircraft s.n. 18255845 and on, with a fwd tapered backing plate. This will require a larger hole to be cut in your nose bowl; however, you'll be able to move the nose bowl fwd of the prop flange by almost 2 inches. This additional space will result in less trimming of the fwd baffles and at the rear of the lower and side cowl and you won't have to dent/cut your nose bowl to build in clearance for the engine mount fwd crossover tube. I used my fiberglass nose bowl and found things fit together rather well, but Tyee was a little shy on the length of the upper cowl sheet. Another inch would have permitted accurate trimming. As it was, I had to use the sheet in its full length, and there was only minimal material overlap at the rear of the cowl.
Once the nose bowl was trimmed to accommodate the spinner and blocked into place, we cut and secured two upper u-channel braces that run from the upper-firewall lip to the upper nose bowl. These braces run along the outside edge of the upper cowl and will be the base of our new cowl hinges. Lots of careful measurements.
After the upper cowl was in place we attached the lower cowl to the nose bowl using the original mounting holes and marked the rear for trimming.
Here's the inner upper cowl to firewall detail. The old centerline hinge support is used to secure the upper cowl through a doubler, provided with the Tyee conversion. The upper cowl U-channel is secured to the firewall via the angle bracket shown here. Some side trimming of the upper cowl is necessary.
I've used 3/4 inch masking tape to prevent scratching my paint job... and as you can see, by using the tapered spinner, only an inch-or-so of material had to be trimmed from the lower cowl
Nice tight fit up front. The fwd Cessna 337 baffle had to be trimmed about 1 inch at the front-center. No trimming of the baffles was required at the front-sides. About 2 inches had to be removed from the rear-side baffles and none from the upper rear.
Here we've installed the oil inspection door, trimmed the upper cowl sides and installed the new side hinges.
Here you can see the upper cowl curved-L-channel brace/former riveted in place.
We rough trimmed the side cowl doors then locked them in place with the original latches prior to marking for final fit. Once cut, the doors are riveted to the hinge and a doubler. The rear edge of the door should be reinforced, as the original doubler will be removed with trimming.
The new hinge line will make the doors a little easier to handle in a strong wind.
With an engine mounted oil cooler and above engine induction system, the lower cowl chin is removed. Don't remove anymore material than you have to. You just want to remove the intake/cooling housing.
There's a bit of a compound curve to the lower cowl so keeping the hole small will reduce puckering and oil-canning.
New lower cowl and exhaust installed. The exhaust pipe will be angle trimmed. Dave Miller |
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