This entry covers work from the last week or so. I spent probably about 10 hours of touch labor on this and at least twice that long pondering, researching what others have done, measuring, and trying to decide how the heck to cut this thing to the proper shape without overdoing it. Vans instructions are pretty rudimentary, but basically, the upper and lower cowl halves come oversized so you can trim to fit. The problem is taht year really isn't a straight edge to Strat from, so you're left trying to get some sort of reference to start from. Of utmost importance is to make Sur ethat teh 2 halves fit as well as possible at the spinner back plate, both for teh gap from teh spinner and with respect to being an actual circle behind it. rather than making a tool for this, I rented the one offered by FlyBoys. It's a milled shaft that bolts on the crank flange and a circular plate that slides and locks down on it. You adjust it to the proper distance, lock it down, mate the cowl halves to it, and trim the edges to fit. Seems eeze peeze, but the two halves don't fit together very well, and in fact aren't symmetrical side to side. In my case, the spinner bowl sticks forward from the inlet openings about 1/8" more on the pilot side than the passenger side. This caused me all sorts of havoc trying to get it as close as I could, knowing that it's not going to be perfect and that I'm going to have to live with an asymmetrical gap or build up the starboard side. Note- per whirlwind, the aft edge of the spinner backplate is 1.6" fwd of the fwd face of the flywheel. I believe in trust but verify, so I measured everything and that seems to check out, so I set up my fixture to leave approximately a .25" gap there per Vans instructions. I also set the cowl vertically so that the spinner would be about 1/8" high to account for eventual engine sag. This is also per vans instructions. What followed was several days of careful fitting and trimming, including sanding down one the width of a sharpie line at a time. I've currently got the upper cowl fit with about .032" gap to the firewall flange and the lower fitting with just a .032 gap to sand down at the firewall and cowl split. I hope to have all these seams finalized tomorrow and start fitting hinges and sky bolts after. Holy cow this has been a job.