August 19, 2005

Today, the engine arrived! Woohoo! The shipping company actually tried to deliver it on Wednesday to the hangar, but sonce nobody told me, nobody was there to recieve it. I’m glad I called the shippers on Thursday now, as it enabled me to reschedule a delivery for today.

So, here are the two boxes everything came in. Big one obviously contains the engine. The small one has all the FADEC goodies in it, despite the fact it says ECi Aircraft Engine Crankcase on it!

I was like a little kid waking up at 4am on Christmas morning and running down to see if Santa had been! It didn’t take long to rip off the wrapping!

Here are some more shots of it. Looks nice doesn’t it? The grey is the same grey as the Instrument Panel.

The data plate shows that we have a TMXOF-360. Note the lightweight Ryton sump from Superior. Our engine is mostly Superior parts, with ECi cylinders.

Here is the Aerosance fuel distribution block. The rather large protruberances are fuel pressure sensors. I don’t know why the have to be so big. There’s barely enough wire in the harness to stretch between them.

Cameron came by to see, and we couldn’t resist offering it up to the airframe….

One thing led to another, and before we knew it, it was on!

In all honesty, it’s only on temporarily. We wanted to see how much room we had for the FADEC ECU’s. There’s enough room for them on the firewall, but we’re going to have to figure out something else for the oil cooler. I really don’t want it on the baffles, but there may be no other choice. We’ll see how we go.

We also had a bash at putting on the harness. Unfortunately, it’s not fitting very well. I’ve no idea how Mattituck fitted it to the engine. All I know is we couldn’t get it to run to the fuel pressure sensors up top, and the manifold pressure and temperature sensors down below. It looks to us like the harness was made for an updraft engine, and we have a forward facing sump. I need to speak with Mattituck or Aerosance about this, as it will not work as it stands. I’ll take some pictures of it so they can see them when I call.

Once we had messed around a bit, we took the engine off and put it back on the shipping crate. The plane almost had a heartbeat for a second!