Brief Description: Fiberglass Molding Around Oil Door - Part 1
Back in September, I custom cut an all-metal oil fill door after the stock fiberglass one found itself in the garbage pail. The door came out fantastic and the fit to the cowling was very good as well. However, as you can see from the first picture in the attached series, the fiberglass molding in the cowling left a LOT to be desired. Its interesting too, that this molding is so poor as the rest of the cowling is a beautiful work of art. I'm not sure why they spent so little time trying to get this hole very good.
At any rate, I decided to try my hand at doing a mold-in-place fiberglass molding around the new oil door. My thought was that I could then sand it down to fit the door exactly and also get a good seal around the door as well.
I started by taking some Glad plastic sandwich wrap and covering the door carefully with exactly one layer of protection. I brought the edges of the plastic around to the top of the door and used a great deal of Scotch tap to make sure that the plastic was tight all the way around the door. I cut a slit in the bottom of the plastic to fit exactly around the hinge on the bottom.
I mixed up some epoxy resin and added quite a bit of cotton flocking, making a really thick paste. I gooped it on to the molding edge of the cowling and carefully used a tongue depressor to get a nice smooth edge along the top of the cowling.
