Day 7--The Engine that Baffles, wings, ailerons, and avionics!

Hi everyone, welcome back!

As we expected, today was a busy day.  We are a little behind schedule after the airshow and are pushing to make up time.  Today Tracy spent most of the day on the Engine baffling and attach points, and i worked mostly on the fuel lines running from the wings to the fuel boost pump, then out to the engines.  But we got a lot of other things done, too--the tailwheel finished (and taken off for later use), the flaps & ailerons mounted (but not attached to the control cables yet).  Perhaps the most exciting part of the day was the arrival of our avionics package!  Pictures to follow...

Finally, a finished tailwheel!  You can see the steering cables attached to springs, then the wheel.  Alas, as soon as it was finished, we took it off.  We won’t see it on the airplane again until October.

This is the fuel boost pump.  It goes between the rudder pedals.  We use the pump during takeoffs and critical climbs—basically high power, high-fuel-demand phases of flight.  It really shouldn’t be needed and is most often bypassed, but it adds a safety of flight factor.

Here is the boost pump up close.  Sometimes simpler is better—it is simply zip-tied to the airframe (heavy-duty zipties, of course!).  Here you can easily see the bypass (the silver pipe traveling left of the pump).

Once the boost pump was in, we had to connect the wing tanks to it.  Doing this requires solving a 3D jigsaw puzzle of pipe bends.  Here are the three pipes we hooked up, and all the pipe-bending tools.  The entire fuel line routing goes from the header tank (a 1qt tank that keeps fuel flowing smoothly during any aggressive maneuvering) to the floor, back to the fuselage sidewalls, around & under the seats, then up into the fuel selector valve.  Like a roller coaster.

Here is a shot of the pipes coming into and out of the fuel selector valve.  The single pipe that connects them is exactly 5 and 1/8 inches long…I know this because I cut the first one to 5 and 3/8 inches and we had to redo it.  We couldn’t fit any pipe-bending tools in the space there so I bent the piping by hand.  Good times.

Tracy spent most of the day working on the engine.  This was more difficult than expected due to parts of the baffling not quite fitting right.  Here she’s safety-wiring the air intake manifold.

And here it is.  She rocks!

Tracy said carving this baffling with a combination of saws, sanders and polishing wheels took her about an hour.

Here she is installing the baffling.  The baffling is a heat shield that keeps exterior lines from getting too hot in the engine compartment.  It is part of the cooling system and helps route outside air into the hottest parts of the engine (like most General Aviation Engines, ours is air-cooled).

Here is the baffling installed except for the forward plate.  One of the nice side benefits of the baffling is the nice clean look it gives the engine.

We got our avionics panel today!  It’s important for us to throw it right in the airplane, because a lot has to be hooked up to it.  Our avionics will outpace our other airplane by about 25 years of technology.  When they are hooked up I’ll post some more pictures of them.  Our panel is designed for cross-country travel under Instrument Flight Rules—basically, flying through weather as long as there’s no lightning or icing.

Here’s the back of the panel.  Oh my goodness.  What does that wire do again?...time for me to go back to school.  The clamps on the panel are where we left off today.  We are adjusting the panel to be 90deg perpendicular to the aircraft waterline.  This will help us align the gyroscopes in the avionics system later on.

Okay party people, that's it for today.  Thanks for following along and See you again tomorrow!
-zen