According to people in the know, the time to do the wheelpants is before you put on the engine and wings, so you can more easily jack the plane up and level it.  Also, not having to crawl under the wings happens to be a bonus.  The other thing is that if I waited to do the wheel fairings til the rest of the airplane was done, I’d never do em.  Or at the very least, it’d be a big bummer.  So I’m doing them now.  Everyone says they’re really sucky to do, but so far, it’s not been the end of the world.  The trick I found to fitting the fairing halves (at least for the mains) is to put the front and rear half together, and spin it on it’s nose while checking the gap.  works pretty well.  The idea here with the fairings is pretty much to get them aligned with the flight of the aircraft, so they don’t adversely affect the trim of the plane.  To that end, there’s a lot of plumb-bobbing, squaring, leveling, string pulling, chalk line snapping, and just a bit of eyeballing involved.  It seems to help if you write cryptic notes on the concrete around where the fairings are being built.  There’s also something to be said for installing the fairing on your head and inspecting your work from the inside.  I think that was a combination of too much sanding dust, and just a bit of exhaustion.  and maybe some epoxy fumes.  One thing that I had a bit of trouble with is doing the epoxy pad for the wheel extension bolt.  there’s a washer that goes against the aluminum extension, and i had trouble getting it to sit flat while the epoxy cured.  I ended up making a little wedge out of a popsicle stick, and shoving it in there.  it held the washer well, and I just snapped off the excess when the epoxy cured.  nice. 

Oh - also, a little shout out to Tim Olson, who had that batch of wheel extensions made awhile ago.  They went together on the wheels as if they were written into the plans.  AWESOME!!!