May 3, 2006

I managed some hangar time today, by getting out of work earlier. To get out earlier though, I had to get in at 6:30 am, which is hard for me to do as I’m not the best morning person.

I made two out of the three spacers required for the oil cooler. I couldn’t make the third one, as I didn’t have enough material. I’ve got some on order from Aircraft Spruce though. I had to put a bit of a flat on the edges of the washers that go between the flanges too, because I needed the bolts to be as close to the cooler as possible. The oil cooler reinforcement from Van’s doesn’t really give you much leeway with the holes.

Here’s the cooler on the baffles. It’s supported here by two screws. Now then, I’m not too impressed by the third inner fixing. It seems a little flimsy. I think I’m going to try to find a neat way to brace it a bit, otherwise it’s not going to last very long. The last thing I want to be doing is pulling all this stuff apart in a few months time to fix it all.

I wonder if I can get away without trimming our cooler flange? The gap is a bit under a 1/4".

Now that the oil cooler is in position, at least temporarily, I can get on with some hoses. Finding a good routing for these was a bit tricky, because there’s a lot of crap back here now! FADEC ECU’s, plug wires, and the fuel line and prop cable has to squeeze through here too. What a mess! The braided line you see here is the oil cooler feed line from the engine. Since these parts move in unison, there’s no real need for a bunch of slack. This was a fairly reasonable routing between everything.

It took me a bit longer to figure out that the best way to route the return line was over the top of everything. I was hoping to get it in between the engine mount, but it resulted in too short a hose length, and not quite enough flexibility to get to each fitting without putting stress on the cooler and it’s mounting.

Here’s the same hose from the other side of the plane. I had to use a 45 degree AN fitting coming out of the engine to miss the oil filter, then use another 45 degree adapter to make the hose sweep up and over the FADEC ECU. I’m wondering if the aluminium fitting will be OK in the engine there, or should I use steel? The fittings to the oil cooler are steel, and the 45 degree hose adapter is also steel. I took the oil filter off for this shot. I think I’m going to go ahead and order a steel fitting, just to be sure.