December 30, 2025 - RV-10 Status Update
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| The front center left baffle now fits nicely around the prop governor. |
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The front center baffles are looking good.
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| Endless fit and trim, fit and trim iterations continue on the top and bottom cowl. |
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| Triming the cowl aft edge so it butts up against the fuselage. |
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| Top cowl pretty much done. |
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Still working on the leading edge fit.
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| Getting closer each iteration. |
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Drilled the camloc holes in the top cowl.
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| Nhu-An and Griffin pose by the RV-10. |
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| Nhu-An trims the top cowl. |
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| Fit and trim, fit and trim. |
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Now trimming the horizontal edges.
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| Duct tape comes in very handy during fit and trim. |
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| Taking it slow -- trimming a little bit each time. |
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| Trimming is done. The top cowl camlocs are installed. Now working on installing the horizontal camloc flanges. |
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Horizontal camloc flanges are drilled and clecoed to the bottom cowl.
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| Now on the inside where they belong. |
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For alignment reasons, I wasn't happy with the placement of the vertical camloc flanges on the right side so I removed them.
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| I fashioned new flanges; not hard to do. |
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Now the verticle flanges are where I want them.
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| Now the main recepticle holes and rivet holes are drilled on the verticle flanges. |
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| The verticle camlocs are finished in short order. |
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| Some minor trimming on the horizontal edge. |
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The horizontal camloc flanges are riveted to the bottom cowl -- right side.
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| Another look at the right side. |
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And left side.
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| More left side. |
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| Horizontal camlocs are installed; and with that the cowl is on for good. |
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| It looks pretty good. I don't know if the Sam James cowl fit better than the stock Vans cowl, or if it was just our having gotten better at installing it. Probably a combination of the two. |
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Now it's time to address the air inlet rings. There wasn't much in the way of instructions on this. We ended up using my friend Mike Bullock's web builders log -- rvplane.com -- which has an excellent section on doing the Sam James cowl air inlets. |
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Nhu-An uses the dremel tool to open up the air inlets to accept the aluminum rings.
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| The Dremel Tool is a must-have for aircraft building. |
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| Look at Mike's web site for the detailed play-by-play, but in a nutshell, you slather release agent over the cowl and inlet rings, set the cowl on its nose, and poor epoxy slurry around the inlet rings. Then let dry overnight.. |
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The next day.
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Nhu-An trimming something.
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| Don covers an area so the epoxy doesn't stick. |
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| Nhu-An mixes up the epoxy slurry for the bottom air inlet ring. |
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| It doesn't get any more fun that this! |
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Notice the little aluminum "dams" that will separate the epoxy ring into two parts. You must do this or you won't be able to get the cowl apart! We learned this lesson the hard way, and had to do the two big air inlet rings twice.
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| The bottom air inlet came out nice. |
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Back to work on the baffles.
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| Notice the air inlet ring at bottom. |
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The next step was to install the plenum. Here is our first preliminary fit.
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