Reamer to the rescue

In my last post I mentioned I found it very hard to drill a correctly centered hole in both prop and spinner, even with my drill press. Especially the spinner hole was clearly off center. I searched for reamers available online, but they all went up to a maximum of 9.5 mm, which isn’t enough. So yesterday I went to a local hobby shop and they offered great help. First of all, they had a good quality reamer with the steps 7, 8, 10 and 12 mm, starting at 1/4″, which is exactly the size of the stock hole in both prop and spinner:

I was surprised how easy it was to ream the prop hole with this tool (I bought a new prop as well). And I also bought this prop balancer you can hold between your fingers, works well, so I balanced the prop after reaming it, using a 400 grit sandpaper, finishing of with 1200 grit. Now I have a balanced prop that fits my prop shaft:

Lastly, it was time to ream and attach the spinner. I bought a new spinner too, since I blew up the supplied one, but I’m glad I did, because this one fits even better and seems to be of higher quality. Also, the prop fitted in the spinner without adjustments (you needed to cut out the holes in the spinner on the supplied prop). So I was very happy with this result, the visit to the LHS really paid off:

Alas, the spinner assembly vibrated way more than my clumsy drilled prop I tested the day before, so I guess the spinner needs balancing as well. I will do a test run with the prop only (didn’t have time for that anymore) and see if that’s okay. I hope I can get the spinner balanced as well though, as it looks very nice on this plane.