Apr 18, 2024     Crank Plug - (2 hours)       Category: Engine

Had my friend Kris H come down to the hangar this afternoon at my request to review my firewall forward installation. Kris is an IA and also works for Lycoming. A second set of eyes, especially with some expertise, is always welcome.

While he was there, I asked him how he recommended removing the front crank plug for a constant speed prop. I was planning to go with the punch and slide hammer as others have suggested but Kris said just use something like a cheap socket extension and BFH to turn it concave and it would turn loose.

I had an old 3/8 drive 6" extension that I didn't mind beating up a bit so I gave it a try. Sure enough, 3-4 good whacks with a hammer and the curvature of the plug changed from convex to concave has reversed and it was loose in the hole and easily fished out. Awesome!

  Oct 25, 2023     Stowed battery charger pigtail - (1 hour)       Category: Engine

I want to be able to plug in external power while doing software updates or a battery tender without un-cowling the plane. My EarthX specific charger/power supply came with alligator clips for the battery, but it also came with a fused pigtail that has ring terminals on the battery side and a capped connector on the other.

I had previously installed this pigtail so I could tinker with the electronics without running the battery down, so I made that installation semi permanent by securing the plug via adel clamp to an engine mount tube where I can hopefully access it through the oil filler door.

I know some people are okay with zip ties for this kind of thing, but I'm not one of those people. I'll use zip ties in not critical applications or where something more robust won't work because of access or weight or whatever, and I have a ton of them on my plane . In fact, I used one to secure the service loop on this pigtail. But, firewall forward nothing beats white adel clamps for security and long life. If you want to secure something in a high temp environment and never have to worry about it again, use a white or blue adel clamp.

At this point, I've lost track of how many of these things I've used firewall forward, but there are a bunch.

  Oct 25, 2023     More heat shields - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

Based on feedback on VAF I decided to try and make a couple of these in a more robust style and material. It's not wasted effort, because somebody also suggested I needed to install these on the l/h side to protect the fuel line and red cube area. I pulled up the RV14 plans and sure enough, on that plane they have a couple their standard aluminum heat shields on the exhaust tubes in that area.

So, I made a trip to my local Metal Supermarket for some stainless. The only alloy they had in stock in thin 24 gauge was 301 soft, so thats what I ended up with. While I was there, I had then shear it into some 3x3" and 3x3.5" chunks, as well as a couple of 1/2" wide strips to make the attach straps.

Today I fabricated these with two mounting straps on the wings rather than one in the middle. That was Dan Hortons suggestion. He also supplied quite a bit of data that indicated that teh finish held by aluminum over time would make it a better surface to reflect radiant heat away from the protected components, and that fiberfrax would be an added layer of defense.

With that in mind, I coated the inside surface of the stainless with aluminum speed tape for it's surface reflectivity properties, and then added a layer of 1/16" fiberfrax to the outside and encapsulated it with a layer of speed tape on that side as well.

I had already bagged and taped up my roll of fiberfrax when it occurred to me that it might be beneficial on the bare aluminum shields I had fabricated a few days ago. I had a piece about an inch wide left over and still available so I removed the aluminum shield under the engine and added a 1" wide strip down the center angle, which is the part closest to the throttle cable.

As it stands now, I have a simple aluminum shield with one mounting tab on the r/h side by the data plate, a similar one with a partial fiberfrax layer by the throttle cable, and two new and improved steel ones on the l/h side with two mounting tabs, a shiny aluminum layer on the reflective side, and a full fiberfrax blanket on the outer surface. It will be really interesting to see how these perform over time.

On a side note, I was deburring the stainless steel stock on a 3M abrasive wheel when the material caught and yanked out of my hand. I got a cut and a bruise on the side of my finger out of the deal. I know how sharp stainless can be. I should have been wearing leather gloves when working with it and/or holding it with pliers while against the grinding wheel. I've been working around machinery my whole life, stuff like this my whole life, you'd think I'd know better that that by now.

  Oct 21, 2023     Engine install wrap-up - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

Holy cow. I thought this day would never come, but as of yesterday, I think I'm essentially done with the engine system installations. The job that put it over the top? The 30 second job of drilling the weep hole at the lowest point of the snorkel, so that if rain water gets in there while I'm parked outside, it has a place to drip out so I don't hydrolock the engine.

I'm calling it 12 hours for this entry, but really I only spend a few minutes on this yesterday. The significant time was hours and hours that were accumulated a few minutes at a time over the last several months that just weren't significant enough on their own to warrant individual log entries. Things like adding a wire tie here or there, or re-clocking an adel clamp, looking on the internet to see how other repo;le have done something.

This time also includes a healthy bit of looking with a flashlight an mirror just to make sure that I haven't done something stupid and that stuff is in an airworthy condition.

At some point I'm going for ask for additional eyes on this because their are a ton of different complicated systems running every which way and it's easy to overlook stuff if you're too close to it by being the one who put it together. There are also a couple of details to be done when closer to first engine start, but I'm essentially ready to cowl it up until it gets to the airport.

  Oct 18, 2023     Exhaust heat shields/throttle cable fire sleeve - (5 hours)       Category: Engine

This took a bit of trial and error.

The issue is that where the throttle cable mounts to the oil sump, is only about 3/4" above an exhaust cross tube. I'm concerned about what the heat might do the guts of that cable over time. With that in mind, I split a piece of fire sleeve longways, sealed the raw edges and ends with RTV and then wrapped it over the throttle cable. I affixed it with several pieces of safety wire then sealed it up with a bead of RTV down the split and a dab on the end where oil might spill on it during a filter change. I couldn't really seal up the front end because it's butted up against the mounting bracket under the oil sump. I'm not concerned by this because I'm not shooting for fireproof here, just heat resistant.

I then fabricated a heat shield from aluminum scrap to go under it on the pipe itself.

If you look at the pix below, The angled plate of the shield is .020 2024-t3 scrap and the strap that's riveted to it with the band clamp under it is .032. The strap is offset because when installed, the shield spans an expansion join in the exhaust.

I goofed and made the first one too small, so I made a second longer one. The dimensions that worked ended up being 3" by 3.75". There isn't much room under there and I reasoned that it was probably better to have the shield relatively close to the pipe and a bigger air gap above it than the other way around, so the angles in the attach strap are such that the shield is about 3/16" above the surface of the pipe as installed.

Since I had the shorter one already made I put it on the exhaust pipe in front o the heater scat in the engine data plate area. That scat is already secured about 1" inboard of the exhaust so I don't think it's necessary to have it there, but I already had it, so I put it on.

That exhaust obviously gets really hot, but I think aluminum will hold up okay in the lower location because it's further downstream of the engine. The upper one is pretty close to the exhaust valve where the flow is the hottest so I'm not so sure about it.

I threw it out there on VAF for opinions and in any case will definitely keep an eye on it, but I may just get rid of that one entirely or make a new one for that location out of stainless steel if I can scrounge some up in an appropriate thickness.

Both of these are secured via stainless steel mil-spec band clamps. I would consider using hardware store band clamps for cabin ducts or something trivial like that, but in this environment, I'm going mil-spec.

Turned out nice.

  Oct 17, 2023     Heater Scat & Mag blast tubes - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

Swung by Airparts and picked up some scat tube and band clamps.

Once I got home, I mocked up the scat routing with leftover hose from the cabin vent installation because it's the same 2" diameter. I then ran a bead of RTV down the length of the scat sections to keep the exterior thread from unraveling. For future reference, my scat sections ended up being about 16" and 40"

While I was waiting for the RTV to dry, I moved ahead to installing the magneto blast tubes. Nothing special here. Took about an hour of playing with it to figure out the best routing with the least interference with other stuff. Had to move a couple of adel clamps, but no big deal.

Back to the scat tubes. Conventional wisdom says that with this type of heat muff, you typically get better heat transfer if your cold air in is further downstream on the exhaust with the air out to the cabin port upstream closer to the exhaust valve. In my case the position of the muff, all the stuff around it and the scat routing I'm using made it work out a lot neater to go the other way, so we'll see how that works out.

I built a band clamp out of .020 aluminum shim stock that you can see in the pictures below. It's secured to a high temp chemical resistant Adel clamp at the intake pipe for cylinder 3. Other that that, the entire scat run is just stuck with red RTV anywhere it might chafe. By careful positioning, it's secured where it shouldn't rub anywhere, and has about an inch minimum of clearance in every direction where it threads through the engine mount.

The only potential interference I have anywhere is where it touches the end of the dogleg brace coming off the alternator. Once the alternator is on and tensioned I can put a dab of RTV on there if it's rubbing. Alternately, I think Vans has a metal elbow that will fit the heater muff. I might get a couple of those which would allow me to shorten up both these scat tubes a bit and clock the fwd one differently to get it away from that alternator bracket entirely.

  Oct 10, 2023     EGT probes and wiring - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

I started this by reviewing the RV14 turntable pictures on Van's website to see if how they clocked these probes made sense for my configuration. I then reviewed the Vetterman documentation which states that ideally, EGT probes should be between 2"-2.5" from the exhaust flange.

I used a 2" section cut from a wire tie to mark around the circumference of the exhaust tubes. This measurement was taken from the lower face of the exhaust flange, which is 1/8" thick, so the reference marks measured 2 1/8" below the mating surface of the cyl exhaust port and the exhaust flange. Once I had determined how to clock them, I drilled a #30 hole this location.

Probes were mounted per the included instructions, including trimming the excess ends off the band clamps and seating the probes by alternately tightening the screw and tapping adjacent to the base of the probe with a wooden dowel rod and a light hammer.

The probes come with #4 ring terminals installed, so I crimped #4 rings on the ship side wires and connected them with the included hardware (stainless screws nuts and lock washers), then covered each pair of connections with the provided insulating sleeve.

I've never been a fan of this ring terminal/screw arrangement. It just seems prone to the connectors loosing up due to vibration. If I have a problem with this in the future I may cut these off and replace them with spade or knife connectors, or splurge on those fancy yellow connectors that Cessna uses. For now, since the rings are what came pre-installed on the probes, thats what I went with.

I had previously routed the CHT wiring behind the exhaust & intake tubes for a nice neat installation. It worked well to just add the EGT wiring to this bundle on the pilot side. On the co-pilot side, the clocking of the EGT probe for cyl #1 seemed like it made more sense to route the wiring on the outboard side of the pipes, below the valve covers. Plus, a while after doing the original routing I discovered that lots of people route the scat tube for cabin heat behind the pipes. That seems to make a lot of sense, so for those reasons I decided to undo that bundle and move all the sensor leads outboard.

People have sometimes reported fluctuating sensor readings if the sensor leads are routed in the same bundle as spark plug wires. In my case, the P-mag Spark plug wires aren't shielded, so this seems like it might be a consideration. Based on that, I routed all the leads adjacent to teh spark plug leads, but separated by means of standoffs and separate adel clamps.

After all this was wrapped up, I powered up the MFD and all sensors were indicating approximately ambient temperature, so everything appears to ops check good.

It feels good to check off another item on my punch list!

  Oct 08, 2023     ignition/spark plug leads - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

Before getting back into this, I spent quite a bit of time looking for examples of what other folks had done that I could shamelessly copy, but I really didn't find much that was applicable to my specific configuration. So, I'm going to try to be somewhat detailed in this entry with the hope being that it might help somebody else in the future.

A while back, I started this install, thinking I'd knock it out in a couple of hours. Turns out, like so much systems stuff on this airplane, there's a huge difference between a simple R&R job vs. figuring out from scratch what that install should look like.

Starting at the lower plugs, I had previously secured the wires aft to the engine mount, and then it got complicated quickly. Basically, there's a lot of stuff in a small area and I need to route the leads in such a way that they don't have any potential to chafe against other stuff, but they still have to be slack enough to account for engine movement.

These leads came with the P-mags, and while not as ridiculously long as some slick harnesses, it seemed like some of them were exactly the wrong length; Too long for the most efficient routing, too short for a more circuitous tidy installation. So, after tinkering with this for way too long, I shelved it and moved on to something else. At this point, it was time to dig in and figure this out.

My list of considerations for this is as follows:
1. routed to account for engine movement, but prevent chaffing
2. not in the way for ongoing maintenance
3. leads separated from each other (per E-mag to prevent potential inductive mis-firing)
4. neat and tidy

I don't like installing adel clamps (does anyone?) but they are undoubtedly the best solution in about 90% of the cases where you need to clamp something like this. However, one issue in this case was the requirement from P-mag that the wires not be run together for more that 6" of their length or run the risk of inductive coupling and misfires or other havoc.

They are all going to be in close proximity where they come off the P-mag so I'm already eating into that tolerance. Therefore I decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to run multiple leads through one adel clamp.

I ended up going to the car world for a solution and ordered some billet plug separators from amazon. Nothing special about them really, I think you can get them from multiple sources. Couple of cautions if you go this route; you can get them in either plastic or billet aluminum, so make sure you know what you're getting. Also, there really isn't any cushion or chafe protection on these, so take that into consideration. They were a little loose on the P-mag harness which has a wire diameter of about .310 , so I was worried about vibration causing the edges to cut into the insulation. To guard against this, I applied a wrap of fusion tape wherever a lead went through one of these, both to snug them up enough to eliminate relative movement in the support area and to add an additional layer of protection against any chafing.

These are basically just two halves that screw together with a flush Allen screw with 10-32 threads. They are drilled in such a way that the threaded portion goes all the way through, but the tip of the screw is flush on the back side. I went to Ace and got some 3/4" long screws, so that when you screw these together over a set or wires, you end up with enough threads sticking out the back that it becomes a stud that you can get a lock nut on.

I also took some scrap .040 and .032 aluminum to the shop at work and sheared then bent some simple 90 degree L shaped brackets.

Once I got back home, I determined a routing for the leads basically through trial and error, then figured out how to secure them with a combination of brackets, separators and adel clamps.

One thing I was trying to do was to keep leads from running under the oil filter so I didn't have to deal with that at every filter change, but I ended up with two under there any way. There really wasn't any other way to do it with the wire lengths as supplied and I suppose two is still better than four.

It's hard to get a picture in the mass of stuff criss crossing the back of the engine, so in case it's not clear in the pictures below, here's basically what I've got going on:

On the top of the engine, I tried my best to avoid piggy backing off the adel clamps that are butterflied together mid-span on the pushrod tubes to support the fuel injector lines. This was an important consideration for me because on some of the Lycoming engines there is a recurring AD to inspect for cracks/fuel leaks at the brazed fittings at the ends of those lines. Based on that, it just doesn't seem like a good idea to be hanging extra stuff on there. Cessna does exactly that in 3 separate locations on some of their IO360 installations, but I think I'd just rather not do that.

At any rate, what I ended up with was a second set of adel clamps coming off the pushrod tubes then an L shaped standoff, then either a billet fitting or an adel clamp, depending on what was needed.

In my case, the nylon closeout that allows the upper plug wires to go through the aft baffle wall needed to be modified. I don't remember whether these came with the engine or with the baffle kit, but at any rate, the holes in them were only about .25, so I reamed them out to .310 for the fatter P-mag harness

Between hard points, I just installed a zip tie every 6" or so utilizing a short chunk of vinyl tubing I had laying around. Emag says you can use left over manifold pressure hose for this purpose, which feels like it's probably silicone, but I didn't really have much of that left over and I had plenty of vinyl, which is supposed to be good up to 200 degrees or so. I'll keep an eye on it and if it starts to deteriorate I'll do something else here.

Where the leads go under the oil filter they have a free span of about 10-12". where they go over that area, I secured them with a billet standoff and an L bracket to a stud on the vacuum pad.

Regarding what mag fires which plug, there are a couple ways to go here. Lot's of people have one mag fire top and the other fire bottom plugs. However, there is a standard convention here which is to have each mag fire top on one side and bottom on the other.

The reason for the top/bottom arrangement is that historically, the lower plugs were the most prone to fouling, so it made sense to not have all your eggs in one basket so that if the mag that was firing all the top plugs tanked, you had to limp home on all lower spark plugs.

With a high energy ignition firing fine wire iridium plugs, I really don't think this applies to my installation, but I also don't see any benefit to bucking industry convention in this instance, so the Left P-mag fires top left / bottom right plugs, while the Right P-mag fires the top right / bottom left plugs.

About the only other thing I have to say about this is that the P-mags are a wasted spark system, with towers 1&2 firing as a set and 3&4 firing as a set. This means that you get to choose either of two different tower locations for each plug as long as you stay within the appropriate pair. This comes in handy when you're figuring out how to route everything, as does the fact that P-mags couldn't care less how they're clocked on the engine.

When I replace this harness in a few years I'll consider custom wires of a length specific to a different routing that has everything going over the top, but for now I think this will work well and is certainly much neater that a bunch that I;'ve seen with wires running every which way.

  Oct 05, 2023     baffles - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

Riveted on the baffle rubbers this morning. This process started with them clecoed on and a trial fit of the upper cowling. I marked some conflict areas around the inlet openings and behind the spinner circle, removed the cowling and then trimmed. I didn't want to end up trimming off too much, so this was a process of trim a little bit, puttee cowl back on and check again, rinse & repeat.

I've got to have the lower cowl on to make sure the upper is correctly positioned vertically. Because I've got several things to work on up front I'm not going to put it on right now, but this was looking pretty good at this point, so I went ahead and riveted on all the rubbers.

Once the baffle rubber was riveted on, I went ahead and reinstalled the prop governor bracket and loosely reinstalled the prop cable. I'll need to be able to move the prop knob in order to verify travels before I lock this down, and I'm going to give it another couple of days for the sika to harden on the canopy skirt before I open up the copy and get access to the panel.

I went to the shop at work and used the brake and shear there to make some angle clips and standoffs that I plan to use for securing the spark plug wires and then once I was back home, spent the rest of the day tinkering with different routings for those.

  Oct 04, 2023     baffle rubbers - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

The RV14 baffle rubbers that came with the kit don't really fit now that I've trimmed and otherwise modified the baffles, so I ordered some generic rubber baffle material from Spruce a while back.

I'm a big believer in CAD (cardboard aided design) so I had previously made and trial fit paper patterns out of a Costco frozen pizza box.

That stuff had just been on deck waiting for a day when I had a few extra hours. Today, after Roy and I installed the canopy skirt, I got back to this. Todays efforts really didn't take very long since all the heavy lifting had already beed done with making patterns etc.

Basically, I just cut these out like making a shirt from one of those paper patterns- did I mention I took Home Ec way back in high school?

Got this all clecoed together and It's looking like everything is fitting well.

  Aug 25, 2023     Cowl work - (24 hours)       Category: Engine

bunch of hours strung out over 3 weeks. I had to go to Missouri to help dad with some financial stuff and ended up getting covid while I was there. Resulted in me being trapped at the lake house for an extra week. Covid is a bummer, but there are worse places to be trapped :)

Anyway, I've been chugging along on the baffle/cowl setup as time allows, and I think I've just about got this thing licked. I filled in behind the cowl inlets per the rv14 plans, then did the uppers to match. Lot's of sanding/grinding to get the shape right.

I think the baffle rubbers will fit correctly now, but when all everything is in its final position, the l/h outboard corner has a bit of an underbite due to that area not being molded 100% correctly on the upper cowl. I've tried a ton of wiggling and finessing to correct this and considered building up the back side of the lower corner in order to give enough meat there to sand it down to match.

Ultimately, I determined that the issue was due to the upper outboard corner trailing aft about 1/16" between the spinner ring and the outboard edge. The only "correct" way to fix this that I can see is to build that area up.

I started by taping off and then sanding off the gel-coat in that area, then waxed, taped etc and installed the cowl halves in their final position.

I then applied a layer of epoxy/flox with peel ply, waited for it to get tacky, then followed up with a slathered on layer of epoxy/micro. after it was solid but not hard, I made sure I could remove the aluminum spacer pictured below. I also sliced off some high spots with a x-acto knife.

Once this is hard I've got a ton of shaping/sanding ahead of me. I hope I'm talented enough to get the shape right on the first try, because I really don't want to go through this process again.

  Aug 09, 2023     rework baffle ramp inner sides - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

In a previous entry, I mentioned how the baffle ramps were pretty far off from aligning with the cowl inlets. There is a process in the RV14 baffle plans for building up the lower edge of the cowl inlets for better alignment. There really isn't any guidance on what to do if the vertical fences in by the spinner don't line up.

The RV7 baffle instructions have you match drill all the pieces of the baffle to match the cowl, but I'm using the rv14 baffles which are pre-drilled on the assumption is that they will just fit there. Turns out that in this combo (rv14 baffles to the RV7 cowl), that doesn't necessarily hold true.

The "before" pictures below show that the pre-drilled ramps result in the inboard vertical pieces being too far outboard. The need to be pulled inboard maybe 3/8" on order to allow the rubber baffle material to lay the right way in the air stream.

The options here are to rebuild the cowl inlets, or to rework the baffles. Seems like in this instance, reworking the baffles is the lesser of two evils, so after some careful measurements, the fwd baffles came off, a bunch of rivets got drilled out, and they were adjusted for an appropriate fit.

I ended up moving both sides inboard such that I left about 1/2" clearance between the baffle plates and the flywheel, which should be plenty since the baffles move with the engine. The distance was not symmetrical on both sides, so careful measuring is in order.

Due to the way the baffle rivet flanges are oriented, I was able to just redrill new holes on the port side, but on the starboard I ended up fabricating an angle gusset to tie the vertical face into the ramp.

Everything was dimpled/countersunk appropriately, painted to match, and riveted per standard shop practices, then reinstalled.

Have to leave on a trip tomorrow, so I'm going to work on my engine dehydrator a bit and then come back to this when I return next week.

  Jul 26, 2023     spark plug wires - (3 hours)       Category: Engine

You wouldnt think something so simple would take so long, but here we are, living' the dream.

The challenge is that P-mag says you can't let these run together for more than 5" without the risk of inductive cross firing. combine that with the fact that these are pre-made to a fixed length and I stupidly eliminated about 1/2 my routing options by installing almost everything else on the back of the engine before I got around to these, and it took a while to devise a plan.

Anyway, these are 80% done, but it would have been a lot easier if I had done them earlier in the process. I'm going to have to relocated some sensor wires and stuff like that where they go through they engine mount but thats a problem for tomorrow.

Todays big challenge overcome is that Vans print is based on shielded magneto wires that can be run together, and they call for running both l/h lower plug wires and also the alternate intake air cable housing all through one adel clamp off the lower valve cover of cylinder 4.

I originally assembled it that way because its within the allowable 5" per P-mag, but the more I stared at it, the more eI hated it. I can see so much stuff that could potentially cause trouble on down the road with a claptrap arrangement like that.

Eventually, I ended up separating them via some zipties and sections of tubing. I also used the same arrangement off the oil return line of cylinder 4 that I did on cylinder 2. This gets that potentially abrasive cable housing out of the same clamp as a spark plug wire.

It looks much neater than what I had originally. Although I could fly it this way without problems, I'm going to buy some actual wire loom fittings from Jegs or someplace.

  Jul 26, 2023     Alt inlet air - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

Completed the installation of the alt intake air this morning. It's pretty straightforward. Just follow the instructions. There are a couple of noteworthy things though;

This is intended to be emergency use only and is not typically pilot resettable without pulling off the top cowl. Picture 3 shows why; I suppose there might be a cable routing where this would work, but in my case, what happens is that theres enough slop in the cable that if you try to push it back closed it doesn't quite rotate all the way and the the locking tab at the top doesn't nest properly.

Also, the plans call for a -12 adel clamp around the cylinder #2 oil return line B nut as a mounting point for the cable housing. It worked much better to go with a smaller clamp on the line right below the B nut, but I suspect that this would depend on the exact location you installed the door and the pivot point.

  Jul 25, 2023     Crankcase breather, sniffle valve, fuel pump drain - (9 hours)       Category: Engine

First thing I did today was install the heater muff on the exhaust for cylinder #1. I have no idea if the clocking of the outlets are right or not, but I just wanted to make sure it would fit.

I then installed the lower cowl to see if the tailpipes need to be moved. Turns out that with this pipe/cowl combo, if you have an inch of gap above the pipes, you have about 1 3/8" below. I've also got them pointed in toward each other a bit and the result is that there's gobs of room all the way around.

Once that was resolved, I trimmed and permanently installed the breather tube to the firewall. I trimmed the bottom parallel to the l/h pipe and terminated it about 1/2" above the pipe. This is all per print, so not a lot to say about it.

I also added a whistle hole about 6" up from the bottom. Vans has no provision for this, but lots of guys install them and it was actually a Cessna AD to add one back in the day. I realize that this vs. a Cessna installation hanging out in the breeze is totally different, but it's cheap insurance.

Next I fabricated the final end pipe for the engine driven fuel pump bypass line and installed it. This took a while because I wanted to make sure it looked decent while not being overly complicated. I suppose I could have just stuck the end of the hose out in the breeze with an adel clamp or two, but this looks a bit more polished.

Finally, I fabricated and installed the sniffle valve drain line. This took some doing. The RV14 plan is auto Frankenstein together a couple of pieces of aluminum pipe with a couple of pieces of fuel line to account for flexing, with one end clamped to an exhaust pipe and the other end adel clamped to the firewall flange. The RV7 solution is a bit basic as well.

I felt like it was kind of chopped up and I really didn't want to have to fabricate a stainless hangar arrangement for the exhaust pipe, so I played around with this for a while and determined that a simple way to accomplish this is with a hose junction right off the sniffle valve to a piece of scrap 3/8" fuel line that sweeps aft between the exhaust pipes.

The aft end is supported by a couple of adel clamps to the lateral exhaust hanger so there is some flex in the assembly via the hose length up front, but the entire this should move with the engine,

So, if we're keeping score, all this stuff goes out through the cowling shovel right now. The tube on the left is the fuel pump bypass drain and is maid from a piece of scrap fuel vent line. The one in the middle is the sniffle valve drain and is made from a piece of scrap fuel line.

FYI- I gave the end of the sniffle valve line a small flare and safety wired the hose clamps holding it together. I don't want that thing coming apart up under there where I wouldn't be able to see it without having the cowl off.

I'm of two minds about ho this ended up; On the one hand, it's a simple and clean installation, but on the other, the more stuff you have in the cowl exhaust, the more it messes up the exit air back there, which leads to drag. I suspect it might be aerodynamically cleaner to have that stuff exit via stubby pipe out the bottom of the firewall lip outside of the shovel area.

I'll ponder this a while. I can change it any time up until paint so it' snot a big deal to fly it this way for a bit.

  Jul 24, 2023     Exhaust hangers - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

I left last Tuesday to go house hunting with Holly. She's got her permanent duty assignment as a Regional Sales Associate (junior sales person) for Citations and is going to be moving to Florida. She can live pretty much anywhere in the state that has good airline service, so we hit up several areas.

Seems like at this point she's settled on Tampa which will be nice since it's not as expensive as further south and also has a service center both there and in nearby Orlando for her to lean into for satellite officing as she gets her feet under her.

Im really happy for her- It's a far cry from my first gig with Textron as a 2nd shift mechanic on the experimental flight line :)

Anyway- Just got back into the shop today and suffered through a 100 degree afternoon. yikes!

I spent several hours working on the exhaust hangers. I tried several different mounting solutions in an effort to insure the geometry was such that the tailpipes won't flop around and that the hangers won't be in the way of something else.

Ultimately what I ended up with was the upper ends attached to the 3rd sump bolt out from engine centerline. This is pretty much a straight shot longitudinally, with a downward angle as they run aft that matches the supplied stainless ears that go under the sump bolts.

Vetterman supplies two tubes that are about an inch longer than the others and by using one long and one short I ended up with something that looks reasonable for the primary hangers and has about 3/8" center gap which is bridged by a fuel hose and a couple of hose clamps to allow for the inevitable vibration and wiggling. There isn't really any guidance about how much gap there should be, but it seems to me that if you go bigger than 1/2" or so that there is quite a potential for it to get too floppy, so I'm calling it good with 3/8". I cute hose so that I had about an inch of overlap on each end and marked slip marks in sharpie at each end on the steel tube so that I can see if the hose slips over time.

Note- I also cleaned up the tubes with an acetone rag before assembly because theres a note on the instructions that says teh tube has to be clean or the hose will for sure slip on it.

I'm going to keep an eye one this and if they don't stay put I may take it back apart and scuff upon the tube ends with scotchbright or maybe try to bead them slightly with a flaring tool, but it look tight for now.

For the lateral hanger I has to cut the ends off of the tubes and I left a 1/4" gap between the ends for the hose to bridge. Otherwise the process was the same.

The way this is all oriented right now, The tailpipes have about an inch airspace at the firewall lower lip. rough measurement indicated that there will be about the same gap between the pipes and the cowl shovel on the bottom side and quite a bit more than that on the sides.

It seems obvious to me that they further away from the belly I can keep the tailpipes, the better, but I really don't know how much space I need from the cowling back there. Is 1" enough? I've got a post out on VAF to ask the question.

I also asked for feedback re how tight should the bolts be that hold the ears together at the slip joints. The instructions say something like "not too tight" to allow some flex for expansion. But how tight is that? I don't feel like I should leave it so loose that the bolt can rotate in the hole, but I don't want it tight enough that it will break teh ear over time either.

  Jul 17, 2023     exhaust - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

I've put this off until now because the engine is still full of preservative oil, but I'm at the point where this domino needs to fall.

I pulled the exhaust port covers and lower plugs to drain the oil out of the exhaust ports and then installed the exhaust.

Let me just say; The Vetterman exhaust is worth every penny- That thing just fits. no problems at all.

The instructions say that you can use anti-seize on the studs and call for a torque of 180-200 in/lbs. This is on the low side of Lycoming's standard value but I went with 180 as a starting point. If I see leaks during flight test I'll up the torque to 200. I also applied a nickel anti-seize.
I want to make sure that I got these flanges flat on the crush gaskets, so I torqued the nuts down sequentially while holding up on the aft end of the pipe so it would draw down symmetrically. 75, 100, 150, 180 in/lbs.

I still have to work on the aft hangars, but it feels good to see a big change like having exhaust hanging there.

FYI- people have questioned how you get access to torque all of these because some of the nuts have tight access. All of them are accessible with a socket and straight extensions with the exception of the aft stud on cylinder 1. With that one I had to use a wobble extension, but no big deal.

  Jul 17, 2023     Alt air - (2 hours)       Category: Engine

Installed the alternate air door in the snorkel. Note- If you cut the hole for this per the print dimension, it's in the wrong place. Instead of 3 1/2" from the lower lip of the filter box it should be approx 3 1/2" from the upper fwd edge. If you get it too far aft, the edge of the assembly would be hanging off in space behind the radius at the aft corner of the snorkel and you wouldn't be able to rivet it in a later step.

Anyway, I basically centered it on the flat spot which seemed pretty intuitive. Once I mocked it up it looked like that would work nicely so thats what I went with.

Cut the hole with the tried and true method of drilling a bunch of holes, connecting the dots with a dremmel cutoff wheel, and then trueing it up with a flapper disc.

Ground the sharp corners and de-burred the base flange, installed the required nut plate, and epoxy/floxed in place per print.

  Jul 14, 2023     More snorkel and baffle work - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

The flox from yesterday filled up the upper lip nicely, but the fit is pretty tight in a couple of places and I didn't get full coverage through the width of the overlap. The instructions say that this is fine as long as you have a continuous bead to make the joint air tight, but I felt like I could do better.I started the day by flipping the snorkel upside down and drizzling some neat epoxy in the lower flange of the air filter flange where it overlaps the snorkel. I worked it into the crack via a razor blade and got good penetration everywhere that was questionable.

More waiting for epoxy to dry, so I finished up the RTV work on the aft baffles, then installed and safety wired the dipstick tube. I then went back and tidied up the sensor and P-mag wire bundles. I also knocked out a couple of other things. At this point, My list of small fill in tasks is dwindling pretty quickly

  Jul 14, 2023     Snorkel & Baffles - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

I started fitting the snorkel this morning, Pretty straightforward, but before I got trim crazy I wanted to make sure it didn't hit the cowling anywhere, so I pinned it in place and tried to fit up the lower cowl.

Had some running with the aft edge of the cowl openings and the fwd lip of the baffle ramps on both sides, so there were several iterations of cowl on/off and trimming to get about 1/4" clearance up there with the cowl installed.

I have no idea if 1/4" is enough. The RV7 instructions are really sketchy about this. It's on my list to research, but for now, I've confirmed that the cowl and snorkel are going to play nice with each other.

Once that was done, I went about fitting the snorkel per the RV14 instructions. They have you attach the air filter frame with snorkel inserted into it, then clamp the lower flange to the fuel metering unit.

Then instructions have you draw a circle 1" larger than the hole on the aft face of the snorkel flange, then center it on the fuel controller. I accomplishes this by measuring 1" out from the edge of the hole in multiple places and just connecting the dots.

I was goin crazy trying to get this thing centered using this reference lines and just could not make it work out of the longest time.

Finally, I discovered that the hole in the snorkel wasn't round. It's got a slight oval shape of 2 7/16" in one direction and 2 1/2" in the other. Therefore, my reference circle was oval as well and this is what was throwing me off.

I pondered this for a while and decided that Vans elaborate measurement system was maybe a bit overly complicated for my needs.

The throat of the Avstar fuel controller is only 2 13/32". So if it's perfectly centered, the hole in the snorkel is 1/32" to 3/32" bigger than the hole in the controller depending on where you measure it. i.e. I've got a little room to fudge it if need be without closing anything off.

With this in mind, I focused on just shifting things so that the flange on the snorkel was flush with the avatar unit and it wasn't rubbing on the starter or oil return line for cylinder 2.

Once I got it sitting pretty, I dusted off my amazon special endoscope, which refused to link with my phone...shoot, no what?

I discovered that when I removed my iPhone SE from it's protective case, it was small enough to fit all the way into the snorkel, so after a few attempts I was able to get a movie of me slithering it down into the snorkel and having a look-see in person. I made several adjustments, with a new phone session each time. Eventually, I got everything within my parameters.

Once I was happy with the fit, I traced the outline of the fuel controller flange on the aft side of the snorkel flange & drilled then clecoed the snorkel to the air filter flange, which fixed the relative fitment of everything.

After all that, it was pretty simple to lay out the hole pattern and trim the snorkel flange to size using Van's supplied template. The fiberglass it quite thick on that flange, so I cut it with the same cutoff wheel I used for the canopy in my dremmel saw-max.

I Installed everything again just to make sure, then glued the snorkel and filter flange together with a epoxy/flox mixture per van's instructions.

Nothing more to do with the snorkel until the epoxy dries, so I spent the rest of the day sealing up all the nooks and crannies on the aft baffles with RTV.

  Jul 12, 2023     Oil Cooler butterfly rework - (8 hours)       Category: Engine

Well drat. I discovered this morning that at it's uppermost limit of travel, the lever arm on the side of the butterfly hits the cowling. I tinkered with this thing most of the day trying to figure out how to make it work.

After much head scratching, I just rigged it so that instead of 90 degrees of movement to go from full open to full closed, it has about 45 degrees of movement and travels from full open to about 45 degrees closed.

This rigging was just a simple fix for my clearance issues, but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea that if the cable jambs up or something, it isn't likely that I could find myself in a situation where I'm stuck with all the cooling air shut off to the oil cooler.

The whole idea here is to choke down the air to the oil cooler and potentially help get the oil temps up during winter operations, but I question how much you really need to choke it down. 45 degrees should head it in the right direction.

If I fly for a bit and find that I don't use this feature, I may just remove it entirely.

I don't like that the control cable for this is just held on with a brass pitch bolt. Also, the lever arm to shaft isn't splined, just held in position with a tension bolt.

Because I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I put a couple of joggles in the cable and applied lock-tire to the set screw. Even if the screw comes loose the cable can't really come off. I also cross drilled the lever to the shaft with a #50 bit and ran a double wrap of safety wire through it.

I hope this feature is worth all the trouble. I've put a ton of effort into this, but at this point I've got is as bulletproof as possible.

  Jul 11, 2023     Worked on baffles - (20 hours)       Category: Engine

Worked about 20 hours over a several of days on this. Baffles are installed, but I will still have to install baffle seals and I will also need to modify the forward end where they interface with the holes in the cowling.

Cutting threads in the baffle tension rods hard beed the hardest part of this so far. My Chinese tap and die set wasn't up to the task so I had to swing by Ace and replace it. That stainless is hard!

There were a couple of places that there was potential interference with the worm clamps to the oil return lines. I pulled off the offending clamps trimmed the excess off the ends and rechecked them to eliminate any potential rubbing. I also sleeved all 4 tension rods for a belt and suspenders approach.

Also, it's been stinking hot here this week. Over 90 in the shop by early afternoon.

  Jul 10, 2023     baffles - (24 hours)       Category: Engine

I want to install a butterfly valve to control airflow to the oil cooler, but the one that I bought way back when from airflow systems has the mounting ears in a really goofy location for what I want to do. Specifically, one of the ears was going to be hanging out into empty space, or I was going to have to move the whole thing in and down about an inch.

In an effort to take advantage of every molecule of cooling air, I wanted to optimize the location, so I cut the flange off, fabricated another so that I could orient the mounting hardware better, and took it over to a friends house for him to tig weld it together.

It came out really nice.

I also discovered that a couple of the worm clamps on the oil return lines were clocked so that they were in the way of teh baffles and/or eventually the baffle tie wires so I spent some time adjusting those. Wish I had known about this before I had all the systems on the engine as it's pretty cramped to get in there with everything installed.

Attis point, the baffles are coming together nicely.

  Jun 30, 2023     baffles - (18 hours)       Category: Engine

Started working on the baffles this week. I'm going with RV14 baffles which are pretty much plug n play for the 14, but at least in my case will need to be cut down to fit under my RV7 cowling.

I did the paperclip trick and determined that the perimeter all needs to be trimmed down about 3/8".

Also need to patch the honking big 5" hole in the r/h aft baffle thats used to duct cooling air to the r/h firewall mounted oil cooler on the RV14.

Once everything was more or less trimmed to size, I painted all the individual pieces white with dupli-color engine block paint. The next day I applied teh strips of RTV that are called out in the instructions.

were out of town for a week over the 4th so that will be it for a while

  Apr 25, 2023     breather tube and fuel pump bypass hose - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

In order to get away from the degrading heater hose issue I has previously replaced the straight breather fitting that comes off the back of the engine with a 45 degree fitting. The plan was to just run a piece of Mil-6000 hose from that to a home made downspout and both eliminate the issue of Vans supplied non-oil worthy heater hose degrading over time as well as save myself $35 by not buying their fancy pre-bent down tube.

Try as I might, I couldn't find an appropriate diameter and wall thickness simple aluminum tube surplus here in Wichita, so I bite bullet and shelled out for vans tube. for reference, it is a 1/2" aluminum tube with a .035 wall thickness, but the upper end is stepped up for a 5/8" hose.

The 45 hose nipple I got is 1/2", as is the mil-6000 hose I'm using. What I ended up doing was cutting off the top curve on the vans pipe and just running the hose from the 45* fitting in a nice arc back and down to the vertical portion which is secured by an adel clamp to the firewall and another one to the engine mount.

I also installed the drain hose to the fuel pump and secured it to the firewall with an adel clamp. neither of these have hose clamps on them yet or the bottom end finished because the exhaust and cowl need to be fit first, but other than that they are basically done.

  Apr 05, 2023     Alt air control cable - (1 hour)       Category: Engine

The last engine control cable to be positioned was the Bowden cable for alternate inlet air. This simple pull cable starts in the cabin with the business eng going to a rotating door that opens a hole in the side of the inlet snorkel so that the engine can still breath if the normal filtered air source in the cowl inlet is blocked.

Because the alternate air source is hot and unfiltered, it's not meant to be used except in case of emergency. But, in an emergency, you want to be able to find that knob in a hurry. I thought about this quite a bit and decided that for that reason, it made sense to locate it next too the throttle.

In the first picture below you can see the 5 (!) knobs on the throttle quadrant sub-panel. From left to right, they are:

Alt air - Throttle - Prop - Mixture - Oil cooler airflow.

From that face plate, all 5 of the cables are affixed to the sub-panel via adel clamps per print, then make their way through the firewall in appropriate locations.

For the alt air, I brought the cable left, then up to secure to the fwd deck rib so that it wouldn't be just flopping around, then out through the firewall on the left side above the rudder bars. Once I get the snorkel in place, I plan to bring it straight fwd just below the rocker covers to where it will attach to the door.

This is something I've been meaning to get to for a while and just one of a thousand small tasks that still needs to be wrapped up. From a psychological standpoint, it's very gratifying to knock out a small job every once in a while where you can really see immediate success.

  Apr 05, 2023     Engine breather - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

My engine shipped with a 3/4" brass straight nipple coming off the breather port. Vans solution for this is to cut a 90 elbow out of a Napa heater hose to make the bend there, then connect to a custom aluminum downspout that immediately necks down to a smaller size (5/8?) then runs down the fwd side of the firewall and terminates above an exhaust pipe to burn off oil vapor and minimize the mess on the belly.

Where it vents is similar to how Cessna and Beech does it and I think that will work fine, but the heater hose leaves something to be desired. as it isn't rated for oil and people report they go sticky as they degrade over time. Plus, I don't see why you would use a big hose and just neck it down when theres a better solution.

I researched this for a while and discovered in the Lycoming illustrated parts catalog that the AN844-10 nipple is an alternate part for the straight fitting that my engine shipped with. This fitting is a 5/8" nipple rather than 3/4" and it is a 45 rather than a straight fitting.

Spruce doesn't list the AN844 in this particular size, but a little rooting around on line revealed that I could get it with a price tag of $19.99 all the way up to $80 depending on who I ordered it from! I called Airparts here in Wichita and they had me one the next day for $25 that I was able to just walk in and pick up. Love those guys.

In spite of what it might look like, there's enough room to remove the straight fitting and install this 45 fitting with the engine already on the mount.

Changed the fitting and clocked the new one to approximately 2 o'clock.

The rest of the plan is to come off that fitting with mil-6000-10 hose in an aft sweeping arc. I was going to just fabricate my own aluminum downspout, but the only aluminum tube I can find locally is a pretty thick wall, so today I just ordered vans option and will cut off the upper portion that won't be needed . This will be a much simpler solution that what's in the kit, but the total cost is going to be about $35 more than Vans kitted solution. Gotta admire the ways they have found to sake a buck here and there.

I'll circle back to this when that tube shows up from vans

  Apr 04, 2023     firewall patch - (3 hours)       Category: Engine

Way back when, I has installed a wiring passthrough on the pilot side upper firewall. Due to the length of my pre-fabricated wire bundles I had to relocate that bundle to the passenger side. Additionally, the neck on the passthrough looked like was going to interfere with the scat tube going from the engine baffle to the oil cooler. Based on that, I had previously removed that passthrough, leaving a 1" hole in the firewall at that location.

I hate to patch stuff on a brand new airplane, but that's the simplest solution here. I went up to my local metal supermarket and picked up a scrap of .020 stainless scrap that they had left over from a bigger job for a few bucks. Using the passthrough flange as a template, I fabricated a circular patch for the front side of the firewall and then attached it with a new bead of RTV. On the back side I reused the doubler that came in the passthrough kit and screwed it all together with #8 screws and fiber lock nuts. The lower screw also serves as the ground point for the microswitch that triggers my "Parking Brake On" CAS message.

This is a semi-permanent fix. In this configuration, it meets the FAR23 definition requirement for a firewall, but it's screwed together rather than riveted so it's removable without having to drill anything out if I need to send anything else through that location in the future.

  Apr 01, 2023     engine wiring almost wrapped up - (30 hours)       Category: Engine

Over the last week I continued to chip away at the firewall fwd stuff. Most notably, the engine wiring. I absolutely hate looking at a car, airplane, whatever, that has a rats nest of wires running everywhere. Frankly, I don't like the way that Cessna or Beech run their EGT & CHT sensors either; They are just adel clamped along the bottom of the rocker covers with wires folded back on themselves and a bunch of wire ties holding it all together. Its pretty easy to work on, and it also goes together fast, but it just looks cobbled together.

I wanted to avoid that if I could, so I spent a while experimenting and determined that I could run all that stuff behind the intake and exhaust pipes and get a lot cleaner result. This makes the terminals a little harder to access but I don't think it's going to be overly so.

Anyway, that took a lot longer than if I had just slapped it together like a production plane, but it's sure going to make that engine pretty.

I then permanently installed the magnetos. There are a couple of positions you can rotate the mags to that make it impossible to get a torque wrench on the stud nuts, but I was able to find a clocking position for both that allowed me to get a torque wrench on all 4 stud nuts, either with a socket or a crowfoot. I torques them down to 17 '/lbs per the Lycoming torque chart

I also hooked up the magneto harnesses including the hose for manifold pressure that tells the Mags when to advance timing. The hose that comes with the Pmags is soft silicone rubber. TS flightlines makes a more robust solution, but this is one place where I didn't see the need to upgrade the oem solution.

I got some appropriate sized nylon tube from the hardware store (I believe it was 3/8" ice maker line) and a nylon Tee fitting. Then I slipped a 1" section over the silicone line anywhere I wanted to support it so that I could just zip tie it to the engine wire bundle without pinching it shut. Even so, I elected to not run it through the adel clamps that support the rest of the bundles because of the pinch concern. The two lines are tee'd behind the upper r/h engine mount and run from there to the hose barb coming off the main manifold pressure transducer mount. I also left enough extra length in the way I routed it that I can cut a couple of wire ties then have it loose enough to blow in it and time the mags without undue effort.

I also rethought how I had the engine grounded. I had two ground cables starting at the recommended IO390 ground point per the RV14 print. One on each side of the bolt through tech engine case. I reasoned that he chances of both of these going bad at same time were almost nil and that bolt certainly isn't going anywhere.

However, the P-mags need a local engine ground and after looking around for a while, I decided that a way to keep the wire run simple was just to ground them to one of the studs coming through the vacuum pad cover, which my main engine wire bundle runs right by.

Since I was in that area anyway, I elected to relocate one ground strap to that area as well. I now have a ground strap running from the engine case down by the dipstick hole to one of Vans suggested locations on the firewall, and a second ground strap running from a stud on the vacuum pad (shared by one of the Pmag grounds) to a brass bolt on the firewall that also terminates the negative battery lead. I can't get much more redundancy that his setup.

I don't remember if I already mentioned this, but I was going to do all my big wires with welding cable just because it's much easier to work with than mil-spec tefzel coated wire when you get that fat. Turns out the stuff I bought from B&C was 4AWG, not 2AWG. It would have no doubt been fine, but I had some Tefzel mil-spec 2AWG from Vans so I remade the main ship battery leads and big starter wire from that, then went to tractor supply and got about 3' of 2awg welding cable to make the engine ground straps out of.

At this point, all the engine wiring is done except plug wires, & EGT probes. I also still need a solution for the engine breather and fuel pump drain, but it's really gratifying to see this all start to come together.

  Mar 21, 2023     Reference data - Fuel and oil hose lengths Category: Engine

For future reference, all of these are teflon hoses from TS Flightlines. All have straight ends except the manifold pressure line, which has a 90 on the cylinder end.

#8 Oil line
Outbd 24"
Inbd 14.5"

#6 Fuel Line
Fwd to pump 12.5"
Pump to red cube 13"
Red cube to servo 11.25

Sensor lines
#4
Oil pressure 18"
Fuel Pressure 11"

#3
Manifold Pressure 15.5" with -3 90 degree cylinder end, -4 straight transducer end.

  Mar 21, 2023     fuel and oil plumbing - (8 hours)       Category: Engine

Great day in the shop today. I had ordered a couple of stainless nipples to transition into the and out of the red cube and they showed up today. Spruce and Airparts didn't have these in a -6 size in stainless so I ordered them from Skygeek. When they showed up, the shipping and provenance paperwork showed that they actually came from Boeing distribution. Some guys will use race car parts on their airplane, and for non-critical stuff then yeah sure, but for fuel and oil systems, I wouldn't even consider using anything but aircraft hardware so it' nice to get that paperwork with specialty hardware.

With those last two fittings in hand, I finished installing all the fuel and oil lines from TS Flightlines. The only thing left plumbing wise is to fabricate a vent line from the weep hole in the fuel pump and an engine breather tube.

For the breather, I'm going to have to get an aluminum tube and hopefully a flex line thats better than the heater hose that vans sells for this application.

Rather than pay $35 for what's basically a glorified downspout from Vans I was hoping to find some 3/4" diameter aluminum tube at the Yard, but the last time I was down there all they had in 3/4" was thick wall, which is hard to bend and extra weight that I don't need, so the search continues.

There's no rush on this particular task, because the downspout terminates right above one of the exhaust pipes and I don't have my exhaust yet to determine exactly where that it.

For the fuel pump drain, I can go a couple of ways and I spent quite a bit of time looking at the pros and cons of each. For the RV7, Vans makes a fitting that's just a brass street elbow with a short 1/4" copper pipe soldered in one end. Shove a nylon hose on it, snake it over to the firewall and down to a short length of 1/4" aluminum tube poking out through a hole in the firewall flange.

On the RV14, they just go with a compression fitting to a nylon tube that then gets run aft with the tube from the sniffle valve line and vents between the exhaust.

I think I'm going to go with the RV7 installation, but I don't see why I need to solder a copper pipe in an elbow (or buy one from Vans) when theres already a local store bought solution. So with that in mind, I bought a simple brass hose barb from Ace hardware this afternoon and will play with this more later.

As I said, all of the fuel, oil, and associated sensor lines are installed, torqued, and adel clamped as appropriate. It's hard to see in the attached photos, but there is a minimum 1/2" clearance between everything. I'll look at the whole area again tomorrow, but based on what I can see so far, absolutely nothing has the potential to rub on anything else, and all line have the ability to flex a bit with engine shake.

  Mar 21, 2023     starboard side plumbing and wiring - (16 hours)       Category: Engine

I think I've mentioned it before, but I absolutely hate when a car or plane has a rats nest under the hood. It just looks sloppy. Probably silly, but I've spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time with planning and trial fitting to try to make this as neat as possible.

In some cases I undoubtedly could have done it differently, but by and large, I'm happy with how this is coming out. A few days ago I started fuel plumbing but discovered I don't have teh right fittings to go into the red cube, so I moved on to engine grounds.

A while back, I had made main battery cables out of welding cable that B&C sells specifically for this purpose. When I was routing wiring to the main starter I got to looking at it again and realized that it's awg4. The refuel wire I already have intended to go from the start contractor to the starter is awg2.

I don't think that a 12" run of #4 is the end of the world, but I had some extra milspec #2 so I went back and made main battery power and ground out of the same stuff.

I them made the main engine around strap out of awg2 welding cable that I got from tractor supply. It goes from the engine block to a nut plate about 1/2 way up the r/h side of the firewall recess, which is one of the recommended locations per vans. coincidentally, I'm also using that same nut plate for an adel clamp thats holding the ground from the battery.

I has some awe 4 welding cable as well, so for good measure I ran a secondary ground to the firewall side of my forrest of tabs. The weak link in this is that both grounds share a common bolt on the engine case, but as they mount on opposite sides of the mounting lug coming off the case, it's hard to see how they could both break ground at the same time unless something catastrophic happens. I may play around with this some more in the future, but as for now I think this is the final configuration.

As of last night, I have completed the install on the manifold pressure an oil pressure plumbing and wiring, and the wiring to the oil tempo sensor as well. Rather than the firewall mounted manifold than vans sells, I chose to go with individual transducer mounts from showplanes. These are aluminum billet mounts that clamp onto the engine mount tubes and therefore give a lot of flexibility about how and where you install stuff. by doing it this way, I was able to shorten up both the plumbing and wiring runs to these transducers significantly.

The M.P. and Oil transducers come with a plug in pigtail. If one fails it would be simple to replace so I just spliced the pigtail into the ships wire bundle with simple butt splices. The wires for the oil temp are integral to the unit so for that one I used knife connectors.

I'm going to list all my plumbing numbers later, for future reference, but basically I mocked up everything with vinyl tube and then had everything fwf made by TS flightlines. The are all custom length for my particular routing, and all have integral firesleeve except the M.P. line.

The oil pressure line is a #4 but there's not really any reason that the M.P. line has to be that big. I had it made as a #3 line with a #3 90* fitting on the cylinder end and a #4 straight fitting on the other. Starting with this combo, I came off the M.P. port on the #3 cylinder with a #3 45* angle, then into the 90* hose end. this allowed me to turn that hose back inboard and run it parallel to the cylinder head oil return line rather than having it just flop aft into empty space.

  Mar 09, 2023     couple of odd jobs - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

Dropped RJ off at work and while I was on that side of town, I swung by Airparts for a new nut for the mixture arm.

I think I mentioned it in a prior entry, but the silver hawk manual says very clearly that if you crack the torque on that nut in order to reclock the arm, you have to replace it with a new nut and torque it to 90-100 inch lbs.

I suspect that this is just some lawyering on their part, but I did as the manual states and ordered a replacement nut, which my local airparts had to get shipped in from their store in Florida. Over $5 for one coarse thread lock nut!

Anyway, I carefully marked the clocking of the arm by drawing a sharpie mark across the serrations, removed the old one, which was still locking just fine, thank you very much!

100 inch lbs is quite a bit of torque. more than I was comfortable cranking into against the travel stops on the fuel servo. So, I put a medium sized crescent wrench on the arm to hold it in position and then torqued the new nut down, ops checked for travel, then applied torque seal. One more little job done.

Something else I've been meaning to do for a while now: Figure out routing for the alt air and oil cooler shutter cables. First off was to determine what went where. It seems to make sense that that oil temp and mixture should go together, while the alt air should be within panicked grabbing distance of the throttle.

Once that was decided, it was time to figure out how to get the oil cooler cable from the right side of the sub-panel to the upper left side of the engine. I won't bore you with the trial and error that went on, but what I ended up with was punching a firewall hole next to the throttle cable passthrough and then running the cable parallel to the mixture cable all the way to the lower starboard dynafocal mount, where it then sweeps upward to eventually connect with the butterfly valve that will eventually live there.

I also took a bit of time to start looking over the behind the panel stuff with an eye toward trimming errant zip tie tails, installing standoffs or chafe protection anyplace I might have missed- stuff like that.

While I was doing that, UPS showed up with a bag of white adel clamps I ordered a couple of days ago, so I can get back to routing stuff on the right side of the engine in a day or two.

  Mar 06, 2023     fuel line plumbing - (40 hours)       Category: Engine

In the last week or two I've been strategizing and scheming, mostly about how to run plumbing and wiring FWF without it looking like a total rats nest.

Was planning to just wait until it was done and post a bunch of pictures of the finished product, but there are getting to be enough details that an interim entry or two is probably in order.

First things first- Not exactly fuel lines, but I decided that in might be handy to have some extra wiring through the firewall in case I want to add electric cowl flaps, temporary sensors; whatever. To that end, I ran 1/2 dozen wired through the power wire passthough and terminated them on each end in a wedge lock deutch connector. you can see the fwd end in one of the pix below, zip tied to the engine mount right below the battery. The other end is tied up behind the sub-panel on the starboard side.

I started routing sensor wiring, which necessitated locating where transducers are going to mount, which necessitated finalizing plumbing routing to the transducers. this is a real chicken and egg scenario.

After several iterations, I had some idea of what might work, so I mocked it up with vinyl tubing from the hardware store.

I'll order the final version from TS flight line in a day or two

  Feb 24, 2023     sniffle valve and engine control cables - (12 hours)       Category: Engine

I started working on engine control rigging the other day but didn't have the right hardware. Specifically, OP-22 calls out AN3 bolts drilled for castle nuts for the mixture bell crank assy and a couple of specialty washers as well. I spent several hours yesterday looking for these locally and ultimately got most of what I needed at Airparts then ordered the rest.

Unfortunately, the print was a little optimistic on the length. The ones on the ends of the bell crank are called out as AN3-10, but that's way too long for one of them, requiring 3-4 extra washers. -7 would be better, so I'm going to have to get different ones.

Started the day by pulling the sniffle valve plug in the sump and draining residual pickling oil out, then installing the sniffle valve.

I also did the final install of the fuel servo, including torquing the nuts to 204 inch lbs per Lycoming service instruction 1484C.

Rigged the throttle cable and safetied. The gap at the panel when the knob is full fwd are set at approx 1/8". Then rigged the mixture cable and bell crank assy to match I will say that the mixture bell crank is quite finicky and its hard to get it set so that you get full throw both ways with smooth travel, and all the other requirements met.

Per print, you use two heim joints screwed into each other to make a really short adjustable pushrod that links the bell crank and mixture arm on the servo. This is shown on the print as having the female joint fwd and the male aft, but in my case, this was causing the assembly to rub on the arm of the servo at the full fwd range of travel. I flipped it around the other way so that the skinny threads coming off the male end were in that area and eliminated the issue.

All adjustable components of this are positioned torqued, safetied etc. Once the correct drilled bolts arrive I will replace the undrilled AN3 bolts with the right ones.

I might also mention that I had to reclock both servo arms. The Precision air silver hawk manual gives a torque value for both shaft nuts. The throttle one is easy because it's a castle nut that just needs a new cotter pin after torquing, but the one on the mixture side is a fiber lock and in addition to the torque value theres a warning in the manual that anytime you loosen that nut you're required to replace it. Now I'm 100% sure that's just some lawyer CYA stuff because in every application Im familiar with, standard practice is to reuse fiber lock nuts as long as they still have friction drag when you screw them on. However, fuel delivery is kind of a big deal, so I'm going to go by the book and now that I've got everything positioned properly I'll replace it with new.

This is a little frustrating. I wish they would have left the arm off or at least send a spare nut in the hardware back because its a virtual certainty that you're gonna have to reclock that thing, and it's a non standard special part. I put one in my shopping cart at spruce, but it's out of stock so who knows when that's gonna happen.

  Feb 22, 2023     started installing engine sensors - (7 hours)       Category: Engine

Started the day by installing the red cube per the rv-14 inst. drawing. However, the mounting holes in the cube are 1/4" and the drawing has you use countersunk #10 screws, presumably to help center the undersize screws in the hole because the holes aren't countersunk.

This seems a little cobbled together, and I don't have any of those particular screws anyway. After thinking about it for a bit, I ended up scrounging up a leftover chunk of nylon pitot tube and drilling it out to 3/16. Then I used it as a sleeve over a couple of AN3 bolts. Worked fine

I then installed the CHT probes. I used some anti-seize on the threads and torqued them to 25 in/lbs per the instructions that came with them

Installed and safetied the oil temp probe. This is a straight thread, so I just lubed the plug with a little engine oil and installed it with the included crush washer. FYI- The torque for this is snug +135 degrees rotation, which is basically just a bit more than 2 flats. You can see in the picture where I made a sharpie mark on the probe to help with getting it torqued right.

I took 2 hours out mid-day to take RJ to work, then run up to B&C and pick up my alternator.

I finished up the day by working on the mixture bell crank linkage but I'm still not quite satisfied with how I've got it rigged, so I'll come back to that tomorrow.

  Feb 21, 2023     FWF wiring - (4 hours)       Category: Engine

fabricated and installed the 2awg starter wire. Hard to tell from the picture, but theres at least 1/2" clearance from anything else throughout the whole wire run. Also, the positioning of the adel clamps allows for some flex due to engine movement.

Drawing OP -30 or 31 for the RV7 shows the wiring for the alternator running down the other side of the engine, also attached by adel clamps to the sump bolts. It would make routing simpler to just bundle all of these along with the starter wire.

I'm picking up my alternator at B&C tomorrow and while I'm there I'm going to ask if there's any reason that these can't all be run in a single bundle.

  Feb 15, 2023     Oil cooler part Deux - (40 hours)       Category: Engine

Well, I thought that I had this put to bed. However, I talked to Tom Swearengen at TS flightiness and he challenged me to find a hose routing that for the oil cooler that didn't require an angled fitting on each end due to potential frustrations with getting them clocked right during manufacture. Plus the idea that less angled fittings lead to better flow.

So, I've been looking at every online picture I could find, photos from Darwin Barrie and Stephan Christopher, Vans prints for the RV7 and RV14, pretty much any resource I could find.

I also burned through about 20' of hose from the el cheapo Amazon hose kit that I've been using for mocking this up.

Long story short; I found 3 solutions that will work.

Solution 1

Routes both lines fwd and down from the cooler, sweeping inboard to the engine. There are 90s coming off the cooler and 45s on the matching hose ends. The other ends are just straight.

Solution 2

Same fittings, but shorter hoses. The inbd fitting goes between the dynafocal mount and the fuel pump. The outboard 45 is clocked more or less horizontally inboard and loops aft of the fuel pump.

Both of these will work, but cause the area infront of the cooler and behind the dynafocal to get pretty busy with oil and fuel lines plus mixture cable and potentially the 2awg starter wire running through that general vicinity.

Option 3 is what I've settled on.

Mount the cooler upside down with 90's coming off both ports, then hoses with simple straight ends sweeping inboard and up to the engine.

I've heard forever that you shouldn't mount an oil cooler upside down because it can trap air inside. Heck, I may even have learned that in A&P school, it's been so long ago I don't honestly remember.

I started looking at this with a more critical eye and reasoned that oil at 100 psi seems like it should purge any air bubbles out of there, so I started questioning if there was any truth this concept. I also discovered that the Showplanes mount that I didn't buy definitely mounts the cooler upside down.

Anyway, I mentioned in on VAF and somebody else said that same thing, so I certainly didn't dream it. It's one of those things that everybody repeats, but nobody seems to be able to definitively be able top back it up with data.

I reached out to Tom once more and asked the question, to which he replied that orientation didn't matter and that any air that was n there would be pushed out by the oil no matter what orientation of the ports. Before he responded, I also reached out to Pacific Aero, on their tech support email with the following:

Good Morning- I'm currently in the process of installing a 13 row oil cooler P/N 8000215 in an experimental airplane with a Lycoming IO390 engine. Oil is supplied to the cooler via -8 hoses and standard AN fittings.

Does it matter which way I orient this cooler? I've always heard that you shouldn't mount them with the ports down because of the potential for air entrapment. However, there is at least one company (Showplanes) that sells a remote oil cooler mounting kit that intentionally mounts this cooler with both ports pointing down.

I ask the question because in my installation it would make hose routing much easier to be able to point the Ports down, but I don't want to impact cooling if that will result in a big air bubble trapped in there.

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter and can be reached via email at genevashortts@gmail.com or via phone 480-440-8817

Best regards,

Terry Shortt

This was on a Saturday, but even so, I had this email response within 6 hours;

Terry,
Your question is very common and equally as common as the myth that aviation oil coolers trap air.

Aviation oil coolers do not trap air because like there is an air fin on the outside of the oil cooler there in an oil fin on the inside.
The purpose of the fin structure is multiple but to include increasing surface area, breaking up flows for increased heat transfer and ensuring even pressure drop across both sides of the oil cooler.
With that, everything flows in the direction of least resistance. So, air will not get trapped because oil will push air rather than oil because it is less resistant to being pushed out of the oil cooler over oil.

I edited the above a couple times while trying not to write a book.
Hopefully it is at least a little bit clearer than mud!
Please advise if you have any questions.

Thank You, Skid Saurenman

Pacific Oil Cooler Service Inc.
1677 Curtiss Ct.
La Verne CA. 91750
Ph. 909-593-8400
Fax 909-593-8499
www.oilcoolers.com

Aero-Classics Heat Transfer Products Inc.
1677 Curtiss Ct.
La Verne CA. 91750
Ph. 909-596-1630
Fax 909-596-1753
www.aero-classics.com

Based on all that, I mocked up the upside down cooler option and the result appears to offer the least potential for conflict with other stuff, as well as eliminating all angle fittings on the hoses. As mocked up in the attached photos, there are 90s on both cooler ports, a 45 on the oil pressure side coming off the engine, and a straight fitting on the oil return to the engine.

Not only did this option eliminate angles hose fittings, but the hoses also got shorter. The outboard cooler port to engine return is approx. 24" and the inboard cooler port to engine pressure supply is about 15". Both of them have nice big radii and enough slack to allow for engine wiggle.

Once I have the rest of my hose runs finalized I'm going to order the whole FWF set from Tom all at once so these will stay in mockup stage for a while.

Feels good to find a relatively elegant solution, but even better to have this put to bed so I can move on to something else!

  Jan 31, 2023     cable brackets & oil cooler lines - (10 hours)       Category: Engine

My MacBook is a 2015 model and has been having battery issues for a while now. I've been limping along for a couple of years with short battery life, but it finally got so bad that the battery was physically hot and it would shut down randomly even when plugged in. I finally bit the bullet and sent it off for a $500ish battery replacement, only to be told a week later that Apple considers it obsolete and will no longer sell replacement batteries or otherwise service it. Drat.

I got that sorted with a replacement a couple of days ago and finally got around too getting everything essential migrated over today.

Based on that, as well as a bunch of other extraneous stuff, it's been about 3 weeks since my last entry, or really since much progress on the project. This entry represents probably 10-20 hours over 3 weeks, with a lot of that being scheming and planning stuff that should be easy but just wasn't.

Installed the throttle and mixture cable brackets on the engine, and trial fit the cables that I had on hand. I'm not happy with the routing and am going to order a 54" mixture cable to replace the 51" that I had picked up from somebody on VAF.

Also, I had the original RV7 oil cooler lines so I used them for a trial fit. Due to the placement of my oil cooler, I'm not able to use standard RV7 or RV14 routing for these lines. Or at least not without causing potential problems on down the line. Specifically, the outboard oil cooler port is just barely located where I can get a b nut from the line onto a straight fitting and I don't have much confidence that it won't rub as stuff vibrates and flops around in there. It would have been a lot easier if I had located this cooler 1" lower and 1" inboard, but here we are. Ultimately, even though it would have been really nice to be able to use standard prefab hoses here, the reality is that the bend radius requirement for the hoses cause an issue for the outboard hose and the fact that I have to pull the P-mags for inspection every 100 hours lead me to not want route the other one behind/below the mags for the other one.

After a lot of though and monkeying around with mockups and whatnot, I think I have a solution that makes sense. The hose from the r/h accessory case port comes over the top of the oil filter and mags to the inbd. fitting on the oil cooler, and the l/h one does off the accessory case in a gentle curve between two engine mount tubes to the outboard oil cooler port.

The black hose in the picture is a mockup made from a kit I bough on amazon intended for roll your own race car lines. In oder to clear everything by a comfortable margin, as well as have some assurance that it won't be able to unscrew itself as a result of engine torque, there is a steel 45 on the back of the engine to a 45 on the hose, and a similar setup on the cooler end.

This will obviously require a custom hose, but I was planning to have TS flightlines build these with firesleeve anyway, so no harm done and I think this will work well.

It's 15 degrees outside right now and not a lot warmer in the shop, so I'm spending my shop time today catching up on this entry and getting a list together for stuff I need to order to move forward with these plumbing and engine rigging projects.

  Jan 04, 2023     Engine control cables - (8 hours)       Category: Engine

So way back when, I laid out and pilot drilled the bracket that hangs under the panel where the engine control cables mount. This morning I botched that part; Because it's not a vernier, the throttle cable housing is smaller and it goes in a 1/2" hole while the mixture and prop need 3/4" holes.

I discovered this prior to drilling, but when I drilled, I stupidly drilled them backward so that teh throttle hole was on the far right.

Since I was going to have to redo this anyway, I strategized about possibly moving the oil cooler butterfly cabe to a different location so the sub panel isn't so crowded I had in mind to recess it under the panel just left of the sub panel and I messed around with this for, no joke, 3 hours. Ultimately, I decided that I wasn't comfortable with something like that tucked away where I might not notice it and made a duplicate out of some scrap.

The prop knob is dead center with throttle and mixture spaced 2 - 7/16". The little knobs for alt air and oil cooler are outboard as much as I could get them and up from the big knobs about 3/8".

Once that was sorted out, I laid out and drilled the firewall holes for the 3 big cables to pass through. Last week I had determined that the solution I've seen others use where the cables go through the angled part of the firewall recess seemed like would work for me as well.

Over the last few days I had reviewed a lot of build logs as well as some phone start Darwin Barrie and Stephan Christopher were kind enough to send me. I also got an idea of how I'll be running oil cooler and sensor lines and don't see any catastrophic conflicts so I had made the decision to do the same thing.

But first, in all that research, I came across the Vans print re oil lines and engine plumbing. That lead to the discovery that per print, there are 3 additional nutplates on the firewall that I had missed prior to hanging the engine. The two upper ones are easy get to any time prior to installing the upper skin, but the lower one is a real bear with the engine in the way. It's for an adel clamp that holds the breather tube so it's not like it's going to be on and off a bunch. Based on that, I skipped the nutplate and am just going with a screw and lock nut. The back side of it is behind the rudder pedals, so it will take 2 people to remove it again, but I can't imagine I'm ever going to run into a situation where that will be a problem in this case.

With that dealt with, I set in to drill the holes for the firewall ball grommets. I went with the aluminum ones from Spruce simply because I knew I was going to have limited access and I didn't want to have to deal with cover plates and pop rivets and whatnot with the steel ones. Yes, I know that aluminum melts faster than steel in a fire, but these are quite beefy and I'll pack the back side with fire seal so i the event of an engine fire, by the time these burn through I'm pretty sure the cowling wold also be gone and they will be the least of my worries.

The holes are on a vertical line 1" from the right side of the recess, and spaced about 1-5/8" on center. This is pretty tight spacing, but the firewall is stainless steel so it's pretty tough stuff and there's nothing structural about that recess so I'm okay with it. If it turns out that it needs stiffening up I can add a doubler on the aft side later.

Cutting those holes was a huge hassle. First, I had to pull remote comm 2 to get access to drill these from the back side. I have a good quality uni-bit that goes up to an inch, but these holes need to be about 1.08 or so. I screwed around with files and so forth for a while before I remembered I had a metric uni-bit left over from when I put a roof rack on my jeep so I dug it out and took some measurements. Turns out 28mm is just about perfect for these. Problem solved.

But on to the next issue! You can order the ball grommets with different size holes for the cables. I had measured the cables at .268" so I ordered grommets size .260" on the theory that .270" would be to loose and wouldn't offer any kind of clamping action. The instructions that come with the grommets say that they should be .002 - .005 smaller that the cable, and I was concerned that this would squeeze hard enough to deform the cable. Drat.

Fortunately, the math works out for a 17/64" drill bit to yield the right size hole and I happened to have one on hand. I clamped everything in my drill press vise and reamed the holes out on two of the balls. Why only two? Because for whatever reason, the prop cable I ordered from Vans doesn't have rubber sheathing? So the cable for that one is only .25" Bother. I think that I can make this work though by just adding a single layer wrap of silicone tape around the cable where the ball clamps down. As I said previously, I'm going to fill these with Red RTV from the back side so it will be plenty fire proof.

All that monkey motion took all day without much to show for it, but I'm glad it's done.

WARNING!!! this is a note from the future. with the firewall penetrations per this entry, Vans 58" prop cable was about 1/2" to short by the time it got the governor. I ended up relocating the firewall passthrough for that cable to a point above the recess. Check out the entry from 4-22-23 for details

  Dec 25, 2022     prelim fit fuel controller - planning rigging - (8 hours)       Category: Engine

Merry Christmas! Both kids are home for the holidays. it's 0600 and everybody is still asleep this morning except me and the pups, so now is a good time to take a few minutes for a quick update.

Over the last few days I've managed to squeeze in a few minutes here and there to work on the airplane, but with prepping for Christmas plus the nationwide arctic blast we had resulted in an OAT of -2 at my house and a shop temp of around 20, not a lot got done.

The fuel controller that came with the engine has no instructions with it whatsoever, so I spent a good bit of time researching what the heck that might look like. I eventually determined which way it oriented on the engine, and it appears that I'm going to be able to use the standard IO390 brackets to mount the throttle, mixture and prop cables.

I got the throttle & mixture brackets as well as a mixture cable from somebody on VAF a long time ago nice to see that in this case, optimism is going to work out. I think all that stuff will fit.

The controller isn't permanently attached in the pix below, just snugged up on the studs so that I could play with cable routing etc.

when I took off the blanking plate at the intake, preservative oil started to run out. The low spot in the intake plenum, where one wold install a sniffle valve, had probably 3/8" of oil standing in it.

The fuel controller had a residue on it that looked like cosmoline, but this has the appearance and viscosity of somewhere around 100 weight differential oil. I sopped a bunch of it out of the bottom of the intake with a shop rag just so it wouldn't drip everywhere. good to know they didn't skim when they pickled the engine at lycoming!

After playing with this for a while, I think that the standard length RV7 throttle and mixture cables and the RV14 prop cable will work, but the firewall penetrations are going to need to be different tan VANS calls out. Other guys had gone with this config. and run everything through the right side of the firewall recess, and looking at it, this seems to make a lot of sense.

I ordered cables from Vans and when they arrive I will document exactly what worked and what didn't here, because this ambiguity and having to figure out what cables and brackets might work eats up a ton of time!

  Dec 17, 2022     Hung the engine - (6 hours)       Category: Engine

I definitely didn't want to be fumbling around looking for stuff while this high dollar engine was dangling on a cherry picker, so I spend a while cleaning up the shop and repositioning stuff prior to starting this project. Swept the shop, etc.

First things first; You can't get the legs of a normal cherry picker under the pallet that these engines are typically shipped on. This leads to all sorts of creative ways to hoist the pallet up high enough that you can get everything positioned.

In my case, Lycoming had shipped my engine with the bottom of the cardboard box reinforced with 2x4s and then that was on top of a 6" tall beaver puke pallet. I was able to grab it by each corner individually and heave it up an inch or so and slide it far enough onto the outrigger legs of my cherry picker that I could get it attached to the boom.

The liner bag has been sealed since I took delivery, and I kept an eye on the humidity sensor in the bag. Thanks to Lycoming's storage/pickling process which includes not only engine preservative oil, but also a sealed low humidity shipping bag and 4 lbs of desiccant, it was completely dry in the bag. You can see in the before/after pictures below that the sensor started turning pink within about 12 hours of being exposed to ambient December air here in Kansas.

On the IO360, everybody says that you should install the oil pressure fitting prior to hanging the engine because you can't get it in past the engine mount after. In retrospect, I don't think that's an issue on the IO390, because it seems like the accessory case is different.

Anyway, I had previously found the Vans RV14 engine install document online and had printed it out, including the position and orientation of all the fittings coming off the accessory case. I installed the oil pressure restrictor elbow prior to hanging the engine just in case, but I held off on all the rest. It would sure have been nice to get all those fittings installed while it was just sitting there, but I'm unsure of how they should be clocked until I can see what the hose routing looks like, so they will have to go in after the fact.

The top two isolators and bolts went in without much trouble, and the lower right one wasn't really much worse. The lower left one was tougher. I struggled with it for about an hour last night before I ran out of time, but finally got after about an hour today.

What ended up working was having all 3 other ones bottomed out, lifting with the cherry picker a bit, and then utilizing a drift pin made from a hardware store bolt to help shift the isolator into alignment.

Warning- I see online builder logs and tutorials that show people getting these started and then screwing them in. Don't do that! You can really screw up an engine case if you start cutting threads into the mounting holes in the case.

The nuts on these bolts only screw on so far before they bottom out on the spacers in the isolators, and I've heard people say just bottom them out and then safety them, but I believe that might be for a conical mount.

I've got a dynafocal mount, plus the mounting bolts that came from Vans have all metal lock nuts rather than being drilled for cotter pins. There is also a note on the print that says bottom out the spacers, then torque to standard AN7 values. There's no practical way to get a torque wrench on the nut on these. I checked drag torque at about 2 ft/lbs and compensated for that by torquing them to the high side of the range for an AN7 (40 ft/lbs).

One final warning about this- With the tail up on a tail stand and no wings or tail on, it's remarkably nose heavy. I can lift the tail spring easily with one hand and I believe in this configuration, the flywheel and a prop would absolutely put it over on it's nose.

I had previously strapped the tail to the stand and also weighed it down with 80 lbs of free weights tied to the tail spring. Even after I put the tail on the ground, I'll be keeping it weighed down until I get the wings and empennage back on it.

  Nov 14, 2022     oil cooler - (1 hour)       Category: Engine

Installed oil cooler onto firewall. It's possible to fish the cooler through the side of the engine mount tubes, but just barely. This is good news, because if I could only go through the center of the mount, It would mean that you'd have to pull the engine if you ever needed to get the cooler off, which would be just a ridiculously bad system design.

As it is, I'll have to loosen this up again in order to get the outboard AN fitting installed, but I'll still consider that a win.

  Nov 04, 2022     Cowling exit bump mk1 - (5 hours)       Category: Engine

After spending most of a week at the not-so-fun windshield trimming I was looking for some low hanging fruit that could give me the psychological boost of a job well done. There's several details to choose from that I want to knock out before hanging the engine. Today I decided to fabricate a cooling air exit bump.

There's lots of data on VAF about how getting rid of turbulent flow and increasing air exit velocity has a couple of benefits; reduced drag as air exits the cowl better cooling efficiency. Vans also touches on this a bit in section 12 of the build manual. To that end, I decided to take a swing at fabricating one out of some scrap.

The idea is to smooth out the air flow by getting rid of the drag associated with engine mount cross tubes and other stuff sticking out, as well as increasing the pressure of the air as it exits so that it's as close to upper cowling pressure as you can get it. That way you're not just dumping low pressure air into the free stream air under the airplane and causing turbulent swirlies and evil drag. The limiting factor is if you reduce the opening too much, you can get engine cooling problems. Some of the Cessna singles have a similar arrangement and I saw something like this on Robert August's Glastar as well.

I'm a big believer in CAD (cardboard aided design) and thats how I started. Once I had played around with some rough shaped in cardboard and had an idea of what shape I wanted, I cut a rough blank out of some .025 scrap and took it to the hangar at the flying club then sheared it and rolled the curve there.

In addition to CAD, there's also TLAR engineering, or "That Looks About Right." So there's was a little manipulation after I got back home as well.

The cowl outlet is 13" wide, so this ended up being about 12" at the firewall flange, secured with four #8 screws into nut plates that I had previously installed. On the upper end, it's secured with adel clamps to the engine mount center tubes. I left about 1/4" gap around the engine mount because it would be a real drag to have a clamp slip and the edge of this thing start to saw into the engine mount.

Speaking of clamps slipping, the -12 adel clamps weren't as tight on the tubes as I would like and I don't have any -11 clamps, so I added 1 wrap of silicone tape to the tube under them to give them something to squeeze down on. They aren't going anywhere at this point and the geometry is such that the body of the clamp is between the baffle/ramp/bump and the engine mount.

Past the clamps, It then extends aft and up at about a 30* angle to within about 1/4" of the firewall. This may not be the final version, but whatever version I end up with, I can run a bead of RTV along that gap to seal it 100% from air leaking between the baffle and the firewall.

This design allows for a tunnel of sorts which will provide some heat shielding from the exhaust for the starboard side brake line run as well as anything else I may end up needing to stuff through there. If this ends up not being the final version, I might also think about making a new one out of stainless for an additional level of fire protection since this will be the normal path of flame progression in the event of a fire in flight. The way it attaches to the firewall lip would easily allow for it to overlap a stainless belly shield as well if I decide to eventually go that way.

Looking at this, I think that it might need to be a little wider to not spill air over the ends, but I'm not 100% sure. My plan is to fly without it until the engine breaks in and then experiment with this one, and maybe another version or two until I max out my performance gain.

A fun project, and very rewarding to get something knocked out with a tangible result in a single day.

  Nov 16, 2021     Engine Arrived - (1 hour)       Category: Engine

Oh boy Oh boy Oh boy!!!

FedEx dropped off my engine today!

  Dec 31, 1969     Finished CHT/EGT probe install & wiring - (4 hours) Category: Engine

Vetterman recommends installing the EGT probes between 2"-2.5" from the exhaust port. Conventional wisdom says that closer to the cylinder they are the more instantaneous the readings, but the further away the longer the probes last.

In all cases, the crucial point is that they all the the same distance so you get an apples to apples comparison between cylinders.

I started laying this out by reviewing the RV14 engine turntable pictures on Vans website to get an idea of how they clocked the EGT probes so I could get an idea of what might work best.

Once I determined that the Vans example seemed to also also make sense for my configuration, I followed Vettermans location advice by taking a 2" section of wire tie and using it to mark several places around the circumference of each tube. I measured from the lower side of the exhaust flange, which is 1/8" thick, so each hole was located 2 1/8" below the mating surface of teh cylinder and the exhaust pipe.

I drilled a #30 hole, loosely fit one of the probes, and got a measurement for how much excess I needed to cut off the end of the band clamp.

Once the clamp was trimmed to size, I seated it by alternately tightening down the mount screw and tapping the clamping surface adjacent to the probe with a wooden dowel and a light hammer. I followed this process for each of the 4 probes.

Wiring was conventional. The probes come with #4 ring terminals and stainless screws, so I crimped #4 ring terminals on the ship side wiring, connected them with the provided stainless screws, nuts, and insulating sleeves.

I've never likes tis ring terminal arrangement. It just seems prone to failure due to vibration induced loose connections. If I have trouble with these in the future I may cut them off and replace with spades or knife connectors, or maybe splurge on Cessna style plug in connectors. For now, since that's what came with them, so thats what I used.

I has previously routed the CHT wiring inboard behind the intake and exhaust pipes and it made for a really clean installation. On the pilot side I was able to add the EGT probes to this existing setup. On the right side however, the orientation of the probe off of cyl #1 seemed to lend itself more to routing outboard of the pipe.

In addition, some time after I had routed the CHT wires, I discovered that lots of people use that inboard space for routing the scat tube to the cabin heat inlet and that seems to make more sense, so I relocated that bundle outboard.

Some people have noted sensor reading fluctuations if they route these sensor wires in the same bundle as unshielded spark plug wires. Since I have P-mags with unshielded leads that seemed liken might be a consideration, so I routed the bundle adjacent to the plug wires, but separated with standoffs and separate adel clamps.

After this was all wrapped up, I powered up the MFD and all probes were indicating approximately ambient temp, so they all appear to be working correctly. Another line item checked off the punch list!