I've still been plugging away, but there hasn't been much visual progress to share lately. I'm slowly chipping away at the cowl fit. These parts take the cake for being the most laughably ill fitting parts of the kit so far. Whereas I'm sure the new planes that Van's is designing probably have everything designed in CAD and then CNC cut out of foam to create the fiberglass molds, I think the 9 is an old enough of a design that the original molds were made by hand. Today I spent hours and hours cutting and sanding to get the nose bowl at least close-ish.
Given the shape of the nose bowl, there's really no way to make it circular vs oval (the picture above makes it look far more circular than it really is). The center points of the halves don't even line up between the top and bottom cowl. By the end of the day, I decided to just move forward. I'll have to reshape the curves to match the spinner after everything else is sorted out. It will look fine in the end, but just needs a lot of TLC to get it there. I attached the 13" disc to the nose bowl and put the cowl back on the plane to look at the fit at the firewall.
The next step is to attach the piano hinge to the firewall for the top cowl.
