Sam - Put Your Pants On!

I've been making some progress getting the new wheel pants fabricated and installed. First, I made the hot wire templates and installed on a block of foam. (As always, click on the photo to see the detail.)

Two cores are cut out, left and right.

Plywood hard points are installed in a 1/4" piece of white foam.  These hard points are reinforced with extra layers of glass.  The one in the center is for the axle, the one at the left is to mount the brake caliper.

I rigged up a simple vacuum bag setup which did a nice job of pulling the foam flat and sucking out excess epoxy.

Here, one of the wheel pant covers has been attached to the foam core. A similar cover is attached to the other side of the pant core.

The trick is to properly line up the wheel pants to give the proper toe-out and camber. I used David Gall's white paper to establish the proper numbers.  We took a cheap laser pointer and taped it to a tripod and first set it up so it would shoot through both wheel pants. That established our baseline.

Then we mounted a board at the center point of the canard and drilled a hole which was our target, again using David Gall's numbers.

Target board.

Once we were satisfied with the position, we used epoxy micro to lock it in place.  We used a hot glue gun and stirring sticks to hold everything in place until it cured.

 Major assistance was provided by Jerry Marstall and Pat McGuire.

 Now we're getting somewhere. a couple of days later the axle, wheel and brake caliper are installed.

 

Bill Hunter was kind enough to come over and help me flip the canard. The next major jobs will be carving and final glassing of the wheel pants, to a nice aerodynamic shape.

 While Jerry was here he directed fabrication of the collapsible Quickie Tail Cradle. This will greatly simplify tail removal.  Wish I had this 20 years ago.

Will I make to Oshkosh?  Stay tuned.