9 hours.
I owe you a report from the last two sessions, which were on 12/1 and 12/2, and 12/15 and 12/16. The week of 12/4, we went to Florida for vacation, and nothing got done. Upon returning, I did some work on control brackets. Turns out my fancy bracket that I made for the purge valve cable isn’t going to work, because there’s no threaded part where the engine-side end of the cable is. What I’m doing is using a piece of angle, which will allow me to hold the cable in place with an Adel clamp.
The other thing I did was fiddle around a lot with cable routing. Supposedly the 51″ and 52″ cables from Van’s should work for the mix and throttle, but I wasn’t exactly sure about that, so I ordered the 60″ ones. Those, I’m sure, can be routed to where they need to be on the throttle quadrant. On the engine side, it was pretty interesting. I wish someone had told me I could have had AFP reverse the mixture direction, because if that had happened, there’d be no danger of interference between the cables, arms or hardware. Maybe on the next plane I build. Lol. Anyway, I was able to find positions for the cables that allows the arms to move freely and not interfere through their entire range of travel, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, I’m looking at running those things fairly close to the exhaust pipes, so good thing I’ve got heatshields, both the solid kind that clamps to the pipe and some of the cloth-type stuff that can wrap around the cables.
With that solved, it was time to make some bracket, which meant more steel. I’ve more or less made my peace with steel, other than the fact that it burns up bandsaw blades like crazy. I first mocked up the brackets out of .032 aluminum, just to get the angles and holes right, then hammered the mockup flat to use as a template on the steel, which reminds me: Superior Air Parts, you bastards, why couldn’t you have made the bolt spacing for engine brackets on your cold-air sump the same as on the Lycoming sumps? Huh? If it wasn’t for that, there’s a good chance one of the stock Van’s brackets would have worked.
It wasn’t all bad, I was able to obtain a PDF of the dimensioned drawing of the bottom of the sump, and from that I was able to drill the mounting holes in my fabbed steel brackets fairly easily. Of course, I didn’t have any of the hardware necessary to attach anything, so I had to make a fairly severe ACS order. In that order, I got 3 more of the firewall eyeballs (which I’ll have to drill out to fit the fat green marine-style Van’s cable), a bunch of rod-end bearings, and some other bits and pieces, including the 2×1/8 angle I’ll need to fabricate the quadrant-side bracket. If I can ever get away from work, the remodel, and my recovering dog (long story, and not a good one), I should be able to finish up the control systems.
Oh, and I’ve also ordered all the hoses I need from PHT, so I should be able to rock out all the engine plumbing as well.
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