Update from August through December 2022:

 I have been slack about updating the blog but the work on the RV-7 has been slowly continuing!

Slot for canopy lock:

Canopy lock with ground down lock tab:

Sealed the firewall penetrations with 3m fire barrier caulk:

Torqued and safety wired prop bolts:

Upper gear leg intersection fairings are done:

Sanded and primed spinner:

Cowl inlet baffles complete:

A lot of work to get the fairings looking good:

More work on the “endless” cowling:

Paul is always a good sport!

Cowling and Spinner work

Making progress on gap filler for aft side of prop. I decided to put my gap fillers  in with screws instead of rivets.

Gap filler after much sanding / fitting with backer plate for screwing into spinner:

I tried making a metal gap filler but I was not happy with it so I used the spinner cut outs with some added filler:

These boards clamped to the prop allow you to moved the blades through their range of motion and check the clearances on the spinner and gap fillers. A lot of fine tuning is involved...

Initial #30 holes drilled:

Checking spinner for wobble with a dial indicator. The spinner fit very nicely from the start. I pulled the dehydrator plugs and rotated the prop to check for alignment. With a little tweaking I got it to less than 1/32" variance.

Initial spinner fit:

First cut out done:

The hole drilling method worked well. The straight cuts were done with a hack saw.

I'm very happy with how the cowl extension turned out. Looking forward to working on this when the spinner is done.