25/04/2025 - Wheel pant fairings (part 4) - 6h30

Continuing redrilling the pilot side inner wheel pant connection 8R8 screws.

As you can see in the image below, the upper drilled hole did not come out even close to the bracket underneath once the bracket is pulled towards the wheel pant.

I re-drilled the front size top screw and this one seemed to come out nice now. I will use the same "offset technique" from the first hole to locate the second.
First drill a small hole and size up.

Meanwhile, used the same technique to determine the horizontal centerline along the passenger side wheel pant.
Clamped the rear between 2 squares and placed some shimming underneath to keep the wheel pant vertically aligned.

Centered the laser vertical line on the seperation line of the wheel pant.

Adjusted the height of the horizontal  line to match the middle of the rear side

And marked some locations with a sharpie on the line before finally connecting the dots.

When installing the rear wheel pant on the passenger side, I noticed the inner bracket legs were seriously out of line and would need some bending of the thick aluminum.
I did not succeed this on a first attempt and decided to take the whole wheel assembly apart to do this bending on my workbench.

The advantage of this is that the installation of the nutplates will be easier to do this way. But the whole disassembly and assembly of the wheel again is some additional work. 


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