Fitting Wheel Pants

Hi folks,

I have been flying my RV 8 for about a year and 100 hours. I have been scratching my head about re-doing the wheel pants. I have Sam James pants and fit them a little too close to the tires. I use platenuts to hold the front and rear sections together. On the starboard side, two of the upper platenuts just slightly dig into the tire. Moreover, hard landings result in the rear of the pants scraping on the runway.

In my assessment, I have the pants too low over the tires. I thought I followed the instructions correctly in terms of spacing them off the ground and off the tires, but clearly they should be perhaps an inch higher. How exactly should one space them? How much tire/wheel should be exposed to the air and how much ground clearance is correct? I followed the thumb-thickness for clearance around the tires, so that has not been an issue.

I am thinking that I need to buy a new set and start from scratch. I molded in the fairing to the grove gear so re-positioning them higher would require a lot of fiberglass reworking. Might be simpler to keep flying with the current set while doing all the finish work on the new set.

I am looking for some guidance here.

Low wheel pants

Remove the old wheel pants remove all hardware from the wheel pants by drilling out any rivets, etc. Then mix some flox, small cuts of fiberglass, and mix it with epoxy until it is about the thickness of peanut butter and fill the holes and damage from removing the hardware. Then refit the wheel covers to the height you want using Van's directions on how to align them. Then sand and repaint....
I broke my left wheel cover in 5 pieces and glued, "epoxied" it back together then painted, looks like new.
Mine are so low that I cannot get any sort of wheel chock to go under them. But I like the aerodynamics so I keep them low..