Exciting times, as its starting to look like more than a fuselage. The instructions for installing the gear are a single line that says “round tube in round hole, install one bolt”, which is just insanely understating the amount of effort this took. While the idea is simple, it took hours and hours of sanding the gear and the legs, plus an ice bath and heat gun on full blast in order to get the legs in. I did wrap the leg in plastic before dropping it in the ice bath so it wouldn’t rust the unprotected part of the leg. It took two of us to twist and push each leg into position to get it close, then I used a drift pin I made out a 5/16″ bolt to get it exactly lined up. The drift pin required a 4lb dead blow hammer and ended up twisted and unrecognizable by the time I was done. Nothing simple about this.
I took this last opportunity before the engine was hung to do some initial mock-up of what I wanted the firewall layout to be. I made a few boxes as stand-ins and won’t be able to finalize this until I have the engine on, but this is my basic idea.
So now it’s time to hang the motor for initial fitting. I bought an engine hoist from Harbor Freight and bribed some friends to come help. I’m using the Lord engine mounts and they’re not symmetric so make sure you install them the right way. The gold side is always in compression, so that means cockpit side on top, and engine side on bottom. The bottom also gets an extra washer, if you don’t put it in, the engine doesn’t sit correctly against the gold mount.
We ended up catching one of the ignition boxes on the engine mount during install and cracking the #2 coil stand-off. Luckily SDS uses off the shelf parts, so the replacement part is $60 from RockAuto. Oops.
We also took the time to upgrade the brake lines from the Van’s provided plastic lines, to a set of TS Flightlines braided steel lines. This swap was pretty straight forward and the lines fit great. The photo doesn’t show the final install, but a few more zip ties and some fabric tape cleaned up the install nicely.
~Paul
Total Build Time: 927.1