Wheel pants, that is.  But more on that in a bit.

You can tell what kind of winter we had here in Oshkosh, WI by looking at how long it's been since I posted to this blog.  We had one of the toughest winters we've had in years here in Wisconsin, and not much flying got done.  Well, actually NO flying got done between the first part of November and the later part of April.  Mostly what we did was plow and shovel snow, or just stay inside and stay warm.  Little by little over that time I performed the annual inspection on the Waco, and also took care of a few minor projects on the airplane.  It is one of those projects I will talk about in this post.

As you can tell by looking at pictures of the Waco in other posts here, she's equipped with a pretty nice looking set of wheel pants on the main wheels.  While these look great on the airplane they did cause a minor problem.  There was no way to check the air in the tires without removing the wheel pants.  This turned what should have been a quick preflight item into an hour-long job.  So one of my winter projects this year was to provide access to check the air in the tires without removing the pants.

Here's what the wheel pants looked like before I started...

Great looking wheel pants, but no way to get at the tire valve stem to check or add air.  I was thinking about how I might want to create some sort of access when I found out that the Waco factory had published a drawing of wheel pant installation that included tire inflation access!  So with the drawing in hand my plan came together.  Here's a picture of the drawing and one of my access cover plates in its "raw" stage...

I made the covers out of .016 2024-T3 aluminum, and finished them by polishing for now.  I'll paint them to match the wheel pants later this summer.  Here's what the covers look like all finished and ready to install...

After finishing the covers I got my courage up and cut a big hole in my nice wheel pant!

Here's a close-up of the new hole in my pant, showing the nut plates installed.  The single hole in the upper right-hand corner of the picture is where the mounting bolt goes into the axle plug.

With the wheel pant mounted back on the airplane, you can see how this will make checking the air in the tires much more accessible....

So here's what the wheel pants look like right now.  Ready for another flying season (minus a little paint on the access cover)!

Now all we need is some flying weather!!