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!