Over the last week or so I've been working on the windshield fairing. Since that process requires lots of downtime waiting for epoxy to dry, I was looking for something else occupy myself with at the same time and decided to come back to the gear pants.

The way Van's has you do this is to match drill the pants to the attach brackets, then fill up the gaps with epoxy so when you tighten the screws down you don't end up with the pant craters around the attach points from cinching the screws down.

This sound good in theory, but its not exactly easy to get epoxy in that gap when the pants are installed. Honestly, I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure out a method for this on my own. Fortunately, I ran across a solution on somebody else's build log.

I covered the mounting brackets with packing tape and turtle wax for a mold release, making sure to cover the brake caliper and anything else I didn't want epoxy on. I then installed the wheel pants. I snugged down the axle bolt, but only installed the screws into the mounting brackets on the inboard side enough to hold the pants into position, but not so far that they started to close the gap and deform the wheel pants. I coated the nut plate threads and screws in boelube so as to make sure and not get them epoxied in place.

I had previously drilled extra holes around the screw holes so I could inject epoxy/flox into teh gap through the holes.

I mixed my epoxy/flox slurry as thick as I dared and injected it through the extra holes via a big livestock vaccination syringes from my local Atwood's farm supply.

Once that had dried, I took everything apart and ground down the extra epoxy that had oozed out past the flange edges.

I'm happy with how one side turned out, the other side not so much and will eventually redo it.

In fitting these, I also noticed that the aft tip of the right wheel pant seems to be sitting about 1/2 inch lower that the left. I don't know if this is just because the garage floor isn't exactly level or if I made a mistake somewhere when I was originally drilling the pants to the brackets. I also don't know if thats enough delta to even be noticeable either visually or aerodynamically on those teardrop shaped pressure recovery pants. I suspect the answer is no in both cases, but I'n going to ask around,. I'll also check this again when I get the wheels off the ground to fit the gear leg fairings the difference may disappear at that point.

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