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.