17th March Dave Simpson very kindly obtained a pair of cutoff valves for me from Skydrive. The, now standard, fuel filter configuration with the filters being located in the seat pan has one problem in that there is no way of cutting the fuel flow from the tank when the filters need to be replaced. This means that is is necessary to drain the tank or clamp the flexible hose when changing the filters. These neat little cutoff valves allow the filters to be changed very easily. To lock them in the open position during normal operation I will use a cable tie looped around the handle.

I removed the engine sub frame from the aircraft and checked the length of the engine bolts. These need to be cut back from the length supplied by Europa and I cut each back by nine threads.

I decided that it was time to see if I had a good looking windscreen so, with the help of a craft knife I removed the masking tape and protective film from the screen. The masking tape was stuck solid in a couple of places so I used a citrus based cleaner to remove most of the tape then used Micromesh polish to remove the rest.

Once I was able to drag myself away from the admiring how good it looked I spent the rest of the afternoon sanding the flaps and the starboard door.

18th - 22nd March Unfortunately yet another no building week. This time due to the fact that I was entertaining visitors all week.

23rd March Only the morning was available for building this Saturday so I took the opportunity to do a few little jobs that I had been holding off until some parts arrived from the UK. First up was the reattachment of the the starboard rudder cable. I hove no doubt that one day the spring I had lost will turn up! I rivetted up the two remaining pieces of the coolant duct and then fitted the safety springs into the primary fuel filters.

24th March Another morning only build day as the visitor season is in full flow, this time the arrivals were from Ireland. I cut out the last few holes in the radio panel. The hardest one was for my Amulet LCD display which had to exactly match the shape of the LCD due to the design of the LCD carrier board. The Amulet LCD touch panel display runs HTML code and Java like applets to act as an interface to other processors. I have written a menu driven front end for the various microcontrollers and instruments that will monitor the aircraft systems for me though this is still being debugged!

26th March Got together all of the tools and parts required to mount the engine and firewall. The target is that by the end of Easter Monday the firewall will be in place and the engine will be hanging on the front of the aircraft. One problem I have already discovered is that the tunnel firewall is secured on the underside with bolts and nutplates. The nutplates are fitted in the footwell but I already have the rudder pedal support plates in place which now prevents me fitting the nutplates. Following the step by step process in the manual does not prevent this problem occurring so it looks like the writers have made a small goof there. I will use nutserts in place of the nutplates to overcome this problem. One specialist tool required for this process is an 8mm hex key which I bought today.

08:00 The process starts. I unwrapped the engine and brought over the hydraulic hoist that I'll be using. To attach the engine to the hoist I am using automotive tie straps with the strap wrapped round the exhaust manifold a couple of times. An additional strap goes to the ring frame just behind the water filler location in order to level the engine.

I removed the shipping supports and fitted the sub frame to the ring mount. Three of the bolts are easy but the one near the turbo is a right pig to tighten as there is very little room for the spanner. I am also glad that I bought a ball end 8mm allen key as fitting the starboard top bolt would have been entertaining without the ability to rotate the allen key slightly. Even then I ended up skinning my knuckles a few times.

09:00 I slid the engine to into the tunnel gap and gently lowered it so that the frames aligned. I found that if I kept the engine slightly angled up I could get enough compression into the top lord mounts to allow the bolts to get far enough in to thread the nut on the far end. Once these had been tightened slightly I lower the engine a little more which then compressed the lower mounts and allowed those to be fitted.

10:00 I levelled the aircraft by putting the tailwheel onto a box and then checked the vertical and horizontal alignment of the engine. The vertical was leaning backwards by 0.2 degrees and the horizontal, which required a displacement of 26mm at 51cm from the centre line had a displacement of 40mm.

I undid all of the bolts and moved one washer aft on the two top mounts to allow for the vertical alignment and then moved two washers aft on the starboard side mounts to allow for the horizontal alignment. I then tightened all of the bolts, levelled the plane again and checked the offsets.

11:30 The vertical alignment was spot on but the horizontal was only down to 35mm. I decided to move another two washers aft on the starboard side and it was at this point I realised that Europa only provide enough washers to cater for four washers per mount and I need five for the starboard top mount. Luckily I had bought a small packet of these at Oshkosh last year so used one of these. I undid the engine mount and moved the washers, then tightened everything up and checked it again.

13:00 The vertical is still good and the horizontal is down to 27mm which is close enough by my reckoning. After all it is only an error of 0.05 of a degree. Lunch time.

15:00 Happy that the engine mount was going to work well and that the engine wasn't conflicting with anything I had done so far I dismounted the engine. I cleaned out the top of the undercarriage and did a visual check that all the nuts associated with the undercarriage were in place and that there were no foreign objects lurking around. I then mounted the starboard plate of the tunnel firewall. After several aborted attempts I came to the conclusion that it is necessary to fit the bolt that goes through the P-clip first. Doing this bolt up is not a trivial task and I found it to be close to impossible using the countersunk bolt suggested as I couldn't get enough purchase with the screwdriver. Having stripped the head on both of the supplied bolts I substituted the bolt for an AN3-6 with an AN960-10 washer under the head.. Next trick was trying to get the P-clip closed enough without slicing gashes in my hand or my arm.

Two fingernails later I removed the P-clip and turned the outer hole into a slot. This was successful. I fitted the top AN3-3 bolt (again with an AN960-10 under the head) to secure the plate and congratulated myself on being able to do two bolts up in an hour and a half!

16:30 A lot more progress. The second side of the top part of the firewall went on a lot easier. The manual has you apply high temperature silicone sealant to seal up the gaps in the tunnel. Rather than use silicone I used an intumescent fire sealant with a fire rating of four hours. This makes the sealant as (if not more) effective than the firewall material though neither the silicone nor the intumescent sealant look very pretty. Where the cables and fuel lines penetrate the stainless steel I first lined the hole with electronic panel edge protectant then buffered the cable and pipes with tacky tape before sealing everything in with the fireproof gunge. The last thing I did was to check the rudder operation and discovered that the hole on the starboard side for the rudder cable isn't quite large enough. I'll make two slits on the outer side and peel that section back. This will also have the benefit of creating a nice smooth edge in the event that the cable does touch it.

The downside of this last bit of work was that I knocked the tail off its box and put a big scrape in my tailwheel fairing.

09:00 Out to the garage again to finish off the firewall fitting. I ran an extra bead of sealer on the joints once the two top panels were in place and then swung the engine back into place.

10:00 With the engine back on I started sorting out the mass of cables that will link the engine to the rest of the aircraft. The electrical cable paths end up being pretty logical so there isn't going to be too much head scratching there. The position that my choke cables come through the firewall lends itself to retaining the entire cable length and tidying the run up by simply looping them in the engine mount. I'll cut back the length of the throttle cables however as these would end up being looped too tightly to achieve the same.

15:30 Now that I am no longer a rich man it's back to the wiring. Where cables traverse the engine in groups I am using the same cable sheath as used by rotax on their prewired looms.

Before safetying the engine bolts I checked the alignment once more and found that the horizontal offset was down to 23mm. To fix this I reattached the engine hoist, held the engine supported in place and removed one washer from the back of each of the starboard mounts. The bottom mount had it's removed washer placed on the front of the mount and the whole lot retightened. An indispensable tool for doing this type of work is a pair of medical forceps as trying to get washers in between the two frames without them would be a tricky task. I checked the alignment once more and was pleased to see that the horizontal offset was now 26mm and the vertical is 90.0 degrees from the horizonal door sill reference. Setup error equals a big fat zero. The engine is on the aircraft.

Engine Mount

Port Top

Stbd Top

Port Bottom

Stbd Bottom

Front Washers

Back Washers

08:00 A quick dive under the aircraft had the bottom two split fins fitted to the mounting bolts and these were followed shortly after by the top two. I cut the fuel lines at appropriate lengths, slid Stratoflex -9 firesleeve over them and attached them to the fuel supply and return points. I removed the MAP switch that feeds the AoA system and then connected the MAP sensor to the engine. I am going to drive the AoA MAP switch from my RPM/MAP display processor as this allows me to remove a total of five joints from the MAP pressure line.

I terminated the choke bowden cables with nipples and then tested the operation of the choke. It is very stiff when I have the cables looped and not too much better if I let the cables hang loose. I'll leave these until I have spoken to Andy Draper at Sun 'n Fun.

Continuing with working out the wiring routes I decided that bringing all the wires out of the port side under the airbox is the tidiest way of getting them to my firewall exit point. I can't bundle all of the wires until the Airmaster propeller arrives as the propeller also has a wiring loom which needs to be accommodated.

11:00 Fitting the lower firewall panel is a task that sits squarely in the "entertaining" category. The two tabs on the side which will be screwed to the lower side of the footwells really should be another couple of centimetres longer as the size then cut from the pattern doesn't overlap enough of the flat surface where a nutplate has to be fitted. I trial fitted the firewall panel several times and trimmed it where necessary.

11:30 A pause for a couple of hours for lunch and to go and get the cowlings from the hangar.

15:00 I decided that the lower firewall could wait until I was feeling a bit more patient. Having skinned my knuckles a couple of times I felt it was time to do something else. Despite the fact that the cowling installation is chapter five in the firewall forward manual there are items in chapters two, three and four that imply that the cowlings are in place or have, at least, been test fitted. The manual states that the cowlings should have been supplied with all of the holes cut, just leaving the area for the hot air exhaust to be cut out. The use of the word should, rather that will, at this point is pertinent as, while they should have had the holes cut out, mine weren't. Out with the drill and permagrit tools for a couple of hours of hole making. I don't have the dimensions of the propeller, exhaust or hot air holes so I am going to leave those until I can measure up an aircraft at Sun 'n Fun.

March 2002, Centre of Gravity Shift