I was on the road for three days last week, so progress was slow again. I got the gear leg fairings trimmed and drilled and riveted the piece of hinge that closes the trailing edge. The shims I was waiting for arrived, so I permanently installed the axles and rechecked the alignment. One side is perfect, and the other is toed out 1/4 degree. Good enough.

Fitting the wheel pants is a bit tedious. You've got six degrees of freedom to work with (three positional axis, and three rotational axis), so it takes a lot of messing around. Van provides a bunch of measurements, and location cues, but it still takes longer than you would expect. I got both wheel pants drilled to the mount on the outboard side on the weekend, which leaves you with just three degrees of freedom left to worry about. The inboard side will be the real trick, because that will fix the alignment in all six axis.

You can see two pieces of paper taped to the floor, one under each end of the left wheel pant. I dropped plumb bobs from the centre of the firewall, and the tailwheel mount to establish a centreline on the floor. I measured over 3 ft laterally, and marked a line under each end of each wheel pant. Then I dropped plumb bobs from each end of the wheel pant and made sure they fell an equal distance from my line to check the alignment with the longitudinal axis of the aircraft. They came out really close, and I'll be happy as long as I never measure it again ;-)