I started installing the cowl by attaching the wooden prop spacer to the prop hub. This spacer was used by Adrian Clout in Bathurst, who turned it on his lathe. As usual, Adrian did a superb job and the spacer was spot on in every respect. I then opened up the prop hub hole and engine cooling inlet in the LH cowl (RH if you're looking from the front) and attached it to the prop spacer. Following this, I bagged the engine so that it wouldn't get contaminated with fibreglass dust - that stuff goes everywhere when the Dremel tool is used.

I followed Sonex's supplementary cowl installation instructions to the letter, but fell into a trap that I shouldn't have. The instructions say to align the bottom of the cowl with the fuselage floor skin, which I did very well - but didn't pay attention to the top of the cowl where it rests on the cowl strap. As a result, I set it too high and by that stage I had already drilled a number of hinge holes. But, the joys of working with fibreglass made themselves known, and I simply filled the holes with epoxy, let it set, and re-did the hinges. Simple as pie. 

The cowl bottom sits slightly lower than the fuse floor, but isn't an issue. Adrian has the same thing with his - makes me feel a lot more relaxed about it. The cowl is also set slightly inboard of the fuselage skin and not flush. To get over this problem, I simply attached two strips of .032" aluminium under the hinge as a spacer and the cowl is now perfectly flush. That's right, it took .064" of spacer to get it aligned. I took a photo of it before I attached the spacers, so that you can see how far out it was. Apart from that, the LH cowl is going on pretty well. All this took me about 6 hours one Saturday.