With the cabin top on, I was able to continue fitting the doors. I wanted to leave myself a safe margin on trimming the edges of the doors until I had the cabin top on permanently, in case anything changed.
First, I needed to put the latching mechanisms back into the doors, and bolt the doors to the plane.
Then I worked on the bottom edge of the door to make it fit properly in the opening. After I got the door to fit nicely, I added the door seals. These need to be in place for final fitting work, as they put outward pressure on the door, and I want to compensate for that with the body work.
Next, I worked on the top door edge. It was a little tight, so there was a little on and off with the door getting that down to a good gap.
Once the top gap was pretty good (I’m going to do the true final door gap further down the road after I bond in the windows), I began working down the sides of the doors. My process is that I’m going to get the doors to the exact shape that I want, and then fit the opening to the doors. It will be pretty easy to add and remove material to the cabin side of the opening as needed. For this trim, I’m going for about a .025 gap. That’s big enough that I know the door isn’t hitting anywhere, but thin enough so I’m sure I have enough material that I’ll be able to open it up to the final thickness. To find this gap, I just cut a feeler out of some scrap .025″ aluminum, and sand the gap open until the feeler slides between the door and the cabin. Where it’s tight, the aluminum leaves black marks on the fiberglass, so it’s simple to see where you need to sand down. For now, I’m thinking that my final door gap will be about 1/8″.
Mid way through my door work, the head chicken in charge of aircraft quality assurance stopped by for an unplanned inspection. She got a good look at the doors from the top of the plane, and then she left!
Inspection passed, I finished getting the door edges looking nice. Then, to build up the cabin top to match the doors, I filled the gap between the doors with an epoxy/flox/cabosil mixture after applying some thick PVC tape to the doors as a release agent. When the epoxy cures, there will be an exact 20 mil gap (the thickness of the tape) all the way around the door. I’ll be able to open the gap back up from there.
