Ignition Breaker wire isolater

I ended up putting 3 mechanical breakers on the co-pilots side console for the ignition coil packs and two ignitions. These circuits are fed from an essential bus sourced by either the aux or main contactors in the rear of the aircraft. Both of the buses are connected to a schottky diode which means that if there is ANY power in the system, it will feed the essential buss.

I opted to not put any of these flight critical items on the VPX. I also opted to keep them out of the AUX fuse block because I wanted them to be in-flight resettable. On my first installation of this setup, I was uncomfortable that now my safety came down to a single yellow ring terminal and a dangling wire. There was no real great way to isolate movement of that cable. After a couple of goes at various circular connectors and adel clamps I came up with the following design:



In this approach I removed all connectors and wired everything direct to the breakers, but isolated movement of the cable with a standoff that I could solidly mount to adel clamps to. Out of the design and into metal it goes.




Probably a little overkill, but why not when you have the tools, the software, and some spare time on the plane for work.


I suppose I have to grab another photo yet of the final install, but here it is for now.

FlyEfii Coil Bracket

If you remember when I got my System32, I struggled with how to mount the 3 coils forward of the firewall. A lot of people had just been using Adel clamps to secure the coil pack to the engine mount. The coils are surprisingly heavy though, and I think far too heavy for adel clamps. At the time, I had found some great bar mounts that I had milled and modified to fit my application. I was really happy with that however when I went to go install the cowl top, they coil pack was sitting too high and touching the cowl top.

With that, my new coil pack design had three goals. 1) securely mount the coil pack to the top bar of the engine mount with ubolts. 2) If possible, get some vibration dampening in the mount 3) Keep the coil packs as low as possible so they did not touch the show planes cowl.

To accomplish these goals, I ended up with a plate that allowed the coil pack to pass through the plate allowing me to put the coil pack at a minimum distance above the actual bar.

I drew this up in Fusion 360.


Then put it on my router table in the basement.



I did cheat and mill this out of plywood twice because I didn't want to destroy the $100 chunk of aluminum. The final product though is shown below.

I secure this to the top bar of the engine mount with three cushioned stainless u-bolts from mcmaster.

I could not get the fourth one because of the intersection of two bars right where I wanted to put a u-bolt.


The final product however was perfect. The coil packs are secured to the plate with 3 AN-4 16 bolts and 3 washers standing them off of the bar by 1/8".

Nose fork tow-bar blocks

My mill is in the basement (heated) so I saved a lot of the small milling projects for the winter and this was a good day to start taking care of some of those things. Not that this was a hard project (nor does it require the mill) there was no reason not to have fun while fabricating.

I started by facing the blocks that were sent along from Vans.

I don't have a DRO on my mill (not yet) so Dykem and layout it was. I used a spotting bit to locate and start the 3/8" through hole.

You guessed it. I drilled a hole in the block. I did almost make a mistake here. I was about to counter-bore the hole to make it look a little more polished, but then I realized it is the actual bolt shoulder that the tow-bar (push-bar) is going to be attached to. 

After the through hole was in, I milled a set of parallel blocks to set the angles for the next four cuts. Complete.

Anti-Rotation Plates

I still have not decided if I am going with a factory new or something like a BPE engine. I did speak with BPE the other day and I told them I am just about to close up my fuel tanks. They told me regardless of my engine choice that it would be a good decision to install fuel return lines into my tank just in case I ever end up with electronic fuel injection. In the case that I go bone stock, I can just cap these connections off, and that seems like some pretty wise advice.

I plan on putting 3/8s AN fitting near my vent line in order to service fuel return. This basically looks just like the vent line, but with a larger fitting to match the flow of the pick-up line. I looked around on Vans for a while, but I did not see an anti-rotation plate for 3/8s fittings. Back to the mill!



There is nothing really earth shattering here. I drilled a couple of #33 holes to have a close fit for some 4-40 screws to hold down the sheet to a scrap delrin block. I will later drill these #33 holes to #30 in order to rivet the plate to the end rib on the tank. From there I milled out a hex pattern to accept the AN fitting.



About the only annoying thing here is that I don't have a CNC. I have gotten fairly decent at running 45 degree lines by hand, but 60 degrees I have yet to master.