Sunday, April 27, 2014

One for the road

I'm getting ready to head out on some travel for work but I got a few things done yesterday so I thought I would post the update before I forget what all I did.  Even though I am traveling and not able to work on the airplane today I did get about 13 hours of "airplane time" in today so I feel better about not losing my entire weekend.

I started out the day by mounting the ANL fuse.  Its under the clear plastic piece you see on the lower left of this picture.  Not much here, just lots of head scratching trying to decide the best place to mount it, then drilling and screwing it down.
Next up on the task list was the spacer behind the brake fluid reservoir.  Originally I had a stack of washers behind each bolt but I thought this would be a more stable mount.  Its really hard to see but its just a piece of .090 aluminum cut and drilled to fit the mounting bracket.
This is what took up most of the day.  I am mounting my oil cooler on the firewall and this picture is taken about 2/3 of the way through that process.  I also added a 45 degree fitting to the manifold barely visible at the top of the picture.  This will be for the oil pressure sensor that drives the hobbs meter.  I actually had to remove the manifold to screw in the new fitting.  Also Travis came over and we riveted the parking brake bracket to the firewall.  Those rivets are under the oil cooler in this picture so not really visible.

I am adding this picture here because I need to contact Van's support.  There is a gap here that I have seen other builders fix by shimming behind the engine mount.  The problem is the hole that I drilled in the firewall to install the main gear leg attach bolt is too high up and wont allow me to install the bolt with the firewall sticking out like this.



I spent a lot of time on this little bugger in the past couple of days.  This is the switch panel that mounts under the instrument panel.  I decided I liked the looks of square rocker switches but they are not looking so good right now.  Each of those holes is about and inch square and have to filed by hand... my arm is tired and I still have 3 to go!