At some point, I am going to want to take the tail of the plane off of the big box it is resting on, and since I don't have an engine on the plane, the plane will probably tip back, hit the tail, and cause me lots of consternation. I saw on Facebook that someone else had put a pole on the front of their plane to hold weight plates, and I had some free time and extra plywood, so I decided to do the same. At the time I am writing this, I don't have any weights to put on the pole and I have no idea if it will be strong enough to hold the weights that I need, so there may be another entry later on that says this was a waste of $27 and an hour....
First I got some 3/8" bolt hardware because, well, it looked beefy enough. I had some 1/2" plywood laying around, so I cut it into a piece big enough for the front and some extra pieces to spread out the load from the washers and the pipe flange in the back. As it turns out, the engine mount frame is angled as it comes away from the mount holes, so the lower backing pieces of wood should have been smaller, or had notches cut in them, or something. I opted to just put the hole closer to the corner and it seems to work, but I would do it differently next time.
For the 1" pipe flange that is in the middle holding everything, I used large wood screws that were about an inch long. As you may recall, that is about twice the thickness of the plywood, so I put another piece of plywood on the back to increase the area that the load is on and to keep myself from scratching myself later on on screws sticking out.
When I get some weight plates (I'm looking at you, Craigslist and Nextdoor!), I'll get to see if this crazy idea works!