Over the last 3 days I finalized my power distribution plan and ordered a bunch of stuff from Stein. That took probably 5-6 hours of careful measuring and panel layout to make sure the vision would actually work.

In the shop, I knocked out a bunch of stuff. I located and installed the brake master cylinder, The main ship battery box, the cabin heater valve, and trimmed the lower corners of the firewall for the landing gear legs.

The master cylinder and heater valve were located per print, but I'm off the reservation with the battery box since I'm using a small earthX battery. This took a lot of measuring and layout to make sure I wasn't creating conflicts and some on-off with the engine mount.

one of Vans prints has a battery box for an Odyssey 680 battery which picks up two holes through the firewall vertical support just right of the cutout, and one on the starboard diagonal firewall brace. Since this battery box is smaller, the spacing didn't work out, so I added a tab on the starboard flange of teh battery box to pick up an existing rivet hole in the diagonal brace. The print is very clear that there's only one -3 bolt on this side in vans installation, but I don't know if I like that arrangement for the EarthX box. Seems like it might be prone to flexing. I'm going to ponder this a little bit and I may come back to it and add another fastened or two on the starboard flange into a doubler on the cabin side.

The RV-10 oil cooler mount arrived a couple of days ago, so I spent some time riveting it together. I'm definitely on my own with locating this, as Vans has no engineering for this cooler on the RV7. Fortunately, a lot of guys have done this already, so I've been reviewing other build logs and corresponding with some guys regarding what they've done and I think I have a location that will work.

This will require precise location, because if I'm off just a little on the low side it will interfere with the main gear socket bolt on the bottom, or if it's too high, I won't be able to get the cooler line fittings on it. I'm also concerned that I'f I get it to far inbd, it might interfere with the left mag or wire harness or something.

Based on all this, I decided theres no substitute for just laying eyes on what I'm dealing with, so I spend a couple of hours unboxing the engine so I could check out where stuff sticks out on the back side.

My experience with engines back in the day; it would show up bolted to a steel cradle in a big crate, get unloaded with a fork lift, picked up with a cherry picker, and hung on the pylon on the back of a Citation. 2 guys, 1 shift, done.

This is a little different :) Lycoming preserves the engine, seals it in a plastic bag with desiccant indicators, then wraps it in another plastic bag, then fills the crate (cardboard box on a pallet) full of expanding foam. It took me, no joke, probably 2 hours to carefully cut the cardboard box off of it and pull all the spray foam off of it down to the level of the sump. I filled 2.5 lawn trash bags with chunks of foam and as I type this, my fingers are sore from breaking off chunks of foam.

After all that, I was pretty beat and decided to call it a night and pick this back up next time.