May 4, 2006

Ten pages of Firewall Forward! Wow. There’s gonna be a ton more too at this rate. I’m really pushing along now. I got out of work at just before three today, so I got a fair bit of time at the hangar. It was a nice day too.

I made the spacers for the air filter screws, to make sure they have a definite ‘bottom out’ so that you can torque then properly, and maintain even pressure around the filter. Here a pic of them all. Cute ain’t they?!

Here they are on the plane. Now you can see how they work. I put the alternate air door on temporarily. This will go on for good when the snorkel gets painted.

Then I made up the fuel feed hose, and put firesleeve on it. This was fun to get through the grommet in the baffles. It’s really tight!

The routing worked out nice though. Here you can see it going down to the fuel pump. It looks tight in there, but there’s clearance all around it.

Then I fitted the quick drain, and safety wired it. Seems I’m doing lot’s of little chores today. Getting stuff done!

One of the many little challenges to deal with included the Van’s tach sender. I fighured out that it was designed to be mounted to a flat plate of some kind, so I figured I’d make a pass through in the firewall. Here, there’s a doubler plate, which is tied in to the top angle on the inside of the firewall, and then the sender passes through a 5/8" hole. The small holes either side of the sender are for an anti rotation pip on the sender itself. I put this big washer on, but I need to buy a locking nut. It’s gonna have to be thin, as there’s not much room between the washer and the tach cable nut. I might have to use a thinner washer. We’ll see. This worked out really well too, because the tach cable is outside where it needs to be, and the wires are on the inside, where they need to be. Perfect.

Time for some more fun stuff. Mounting the secondary alternator. The furthest nut in the picture was the most difficult to get to, but once I’d got it started, it was easy to tighten it up. I forgot to take a distant shot of the alternator mounted. Oh well. I need to buy a new connector for it too, as the one that came with it was smashed to smitherines.

Among my other tasks are to tidy up all the wiring harness stuff. For this, I need a shed load of Adel clamps, so I better get on to SteinAir or someone for those. I can’t see me getting them in time for the weekend though. Oh well. There’s still plenty of other stuff that needs doing.