Total nightmare

No good news today. Fitting the Savannah’s new prop is turning out to be much more tricky than I expected. The problem is the spinner. Its design includes a very deep skirt that extends some way behind the prop towards the engine cowling as I showed in my previous post. It has been on and off three times today and each time I have ground a little more of the skirt away. However, it still hasn’t been enough to provide adequate clearance of the engine cowling.

The reason for this is that the original spinner back plate was made of metal rather than the carbon fibre of the new one and was therefore much thinner. It was also of a design such that the spinner itself was mounted further forward on the back plate compared to the new one.

I’m now in a slight quandary. I’m reluctant to grind any more of the new spinner’s back plate away, although in theory I could take a bit more off. However, even if I did that, the spinner itself might still be much too close to the front of the engine cowling for comfort.

This leaves me with one other choice, which I think I’m going to have to make, namely to fit a small spacer of say 3 or 4 mm behind the spinner. This will mean that the prop itself will also move forward by the same distance, but I don’t think that that will be a problem.

If I’d known about this, I might well have purchased a spinner from another source, but it’s a bit late for that now 😐