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Plan for a Built Up Cowling for Nobler ARF??

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Dan McEntee:
   As the title infers, has anyone engineered and drawn a plan for a built up cowling for the Nobler ARF? I have two that have been hanging around for a long time and have finished getting them ready for flight, both assemblies started by other people but never finished. The fiberglass cowling they came with was a good concept, just poorly executed! In short, it doesn't fit worth a damn. The original owners butchered the cowlings but I have them sorta stuck on. Over the winter I just may build new ones but it would be nice to work from a plan and not have to engineer it. Hopefully I will have some other projects well underway by then also.
    I wonder how many of these kits are stashed away for "someday"?? Maybe as many as there were Green Box Noblers??
  Type at you later,
   

Craig Beswick:
Hey Dan,
No plans, sorry. I did do what you are contemplating.
Basically glued on a top block and blended it in. Added a nose ring, straightened up some edges on the fuselage to avoid muffler and NVA. Glued a cowl together, fitted it up then started to whittle away.

I will hunt out my Nobler over the weekend for photos if you like.

All the best.
Craig

Ken Culbertson:
Sorry Dan, best I could do since the plane got roasted in my house fire a couple of years back.  I did it originally ala Green Box.  When I converted it to electric, I went more to Gieseke style since I needed the full nose ring.  Same approach as Craig.  Block it up and start whittling. 

Ken

Tim Wescott:
First: I'm constitutionally incapable of following the plans when building a cowl.  Even for a scale plane I'll find a "better" way (which sometimes may actually be better) to make a scale-ish cowl.  So take that into account when you read this.

Second: The whole concept of fitting a cowl that TF executed on the ARF nobler is just not going to fit well, or at least not without a lot of work.  Shell cowls like that work well on airplanes that came originally with cowls that fit loosely at the back to let out cooling air, like light planes in the 1940's.

The only way I could see a shell cowl like that really fitting is if you glued a plywood ring into the back, either about 1/4" forward of the back edge so you can use the TF mounts, or right at the back so it fits up against the fuselage.  When you try that, you'll probably find that the cowl is a bit big, and needs some wedges cut out of it to narrow it down (if I were going to do this on a plane of my making, I'd probably leave the fuse roughly finished, then finish it to the cowl contour -- which won't change now, because of the ring).  By the time you're done, you'll have spent as much time as Ty, Ken and Craig did on theirs, and it'll still have that ugly vertical parting line.

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