cowl camlock attach strip
I decided to look into fabricating the strip at the firewall that holds the camlocks that attaches the cowl. In a previous order with Vans, I ordered some custom cut ($5 per cut) .063″ aluminum sheet to make these out of. I am convinced that it is well worth the cost of having big stuff like this custom cut so I am not spending a few hours gnawing on it with hand tools trying to cut a straight line. I don’t have a foot shear (yet!) that can reliably produce long straight cuts in sheet. Especially .063. Oh well, I don’t need to justify spending a little to make my life a whole lot easier. I can’t wait to move into the hangar, more space for cool machinery.
I did some camlock hole layout on the sides and top. More just guessing than anything else. I don’t think I’m going to have even spacing all the way around. So far, I’m thinking (what I have marked so far) 4″ spacing across the top, and about 3.5 around the top curve and down the sides. We’ll see. I spent some time cutting the strips to length, applying the correct bends, and filing a slight radius on the inside edge at the firewall flange. I have extra material just in case… UPDATE: four months later, as I’m installing the cowl, I decided to reduce the width of the camloc strip by 1/8″ after I had all of the attach holes drilled. There was just a little extra material in the width that I didn’t need. So, the perfect width would have been 1-13/16″
