Does anyone have any words of advice on cowling repairs for these early model 182s? Attached are pics of my cowling. The nose bowls are shot, my patches have patches, and i'm done trying to keep these going. So i was originally planning on changing the nose bowls with some new carbon fiber ones. But having had done previous sheetmetal work on these I know the top skin has become very brittle and I am afraid of it cracking when i rivet the new bowls in. I also have a pretty ugly but functional patch around the oil door.

So does anyone have any recommendations? I know my choices are carbon fiber (Selkirk and Knots2u) or finding someone that has the capability of fabricating new skins.

I don't know about carbon fiber but fiberglass does not hold up to vibration as well as your old aluminum cowl does. Flying pipeline, hundred hour inspection was about every month. Far more than once a year I had to redo parts of the cowl and wing tips and wheel pants, etc.

I've got a fiberglass cowling on my 180, it appears to be a quality product. I assume its a Selkirk, it was on before I bought the plane. I have seen a carbon fiber one on a '56 182, it was of good quality and light weight. I am told that my fiberglass one is heavy, but I have nothing to compare it to.

I have about 500 hours on my 180 since I bought it, not sure how many hours were on that cowling before I bought it. So far it is holding up well. Only issue is a small crack in the oil filler door.

I would bite the bullet and get the carbon fiber cowling. There’s been one on a part 135 floatplane 180 at kenmore for the last 5 seasons, it’s holding up great in pretty harsh conditions. It was installed when the airframe had 15,000 hours, guess they got their money’s worth out of the first one.

contactflying wrote:I don't know about carbon fiber but fiberglass does not hold up to vibration as well as your old aluminum cowl does. Flying pipeline, hundred hour inspection was about every month. Far more than once a year I had to redo parts of the cowl and wing tips and wheel pants, etc.

Early and poor quality composite technology gave composite materials a bad reputation early on.

Modern fiber/resin systems, carbon or glass have far better fatigue strength than aluminum. All of those cracks on the cowling - fatigue related.

Where a crack will propagate through aluminum during cyclic loading, or any metal for that matter, a fiber oriented across the crack will arrest the crack propagation in a well designed composite part.

I would go with a composite cowling and never think about it again.