Brief Description: Pant cleanup and post cure, w ideas
After trimming up the pants and puting the halves together I noticed that the carbon layups warped one of the halves pretty bad. No problem I clamped it into position and used a hair dryer to heat it up to 160 for a while and let it post cure. After only 30 minutes, it stayed in that position. Easy fix. While that one pant was post curing I went over to the other and pondered how I want to tackle the access to the valve stem. I know I don't want to remove the pants to add air and I really would like to be able to see the tire without laying on the ground. I'm thinking that after I trim pant to fit the wheel I may ditch the access hole all together and just carve out a section of the pant that would allow better view of the tire, wheel, and valve stem. I was just reading about a guy that added just an aft portion of a wheel pant to his airplane and it added 10 kts!!! He assumed that almost all the drag was from separation BEHIND the wheel and not so much in front. Well, the Sam James pants are said to add 10 kts as well, so cutting out a larger access hole temps me to think it won't really make that big of a speed difference....more later.
