Sheet metal gurus,
We had all the cowling off to replace the cylinder heads with ECI Titan nickel cylinders. When the cowling was put back on, lining up the fastening holes was a problem, especially the dzus fasteners. I have to really "fanagle", i.e. push the hinged panels around quite a bit to get them to engage the wire. We started over, loosened everything, pushed, pulled and retightened all the screws again. This time the dzus fasteners lined up better, but only slightly. I'm afraid flying with all this tension on the fasteners would not be a good idea. The one thing we didn't try was moving the 4 cowling u-channel supports which are attached to the engine mount points at the firewall. It appears they can move in a fore and aft motion, but the engine mount bolts would have to be loosened first. Is this a possible adjustment point? The whole cowling assembly is so "interconnected" that if any one item is out of place slightly, it throws everything else out of adjustment. Are we missing anything? Does everyone else have this same experience? Do we just have to keep loosening and tightening bolts in a different order to get things to fit? Is there someone in the group who has a magic sequence to make this easy? Frustrated-after-7-months-of-not-flying, Darick
