Mounting the Engine!

With my parents in town and my dad ready to spend some time in the garage, it was finally time to hang the engine. The long story short, this was a lot easier than the stories I heard with the motor mount not lining up to the mounting ears. With the engine load leveler on the hoist, this is actually a one person job (its not like you are trying to get the engine bell housing bolts in place while laying under a car!)

I would say the thing that took the most amount of time was getting the lower mounting ear bolts torqued. Not that it was impossible, it was a bit annoying and I ended up taking the rear down tubes off of the sump to get at the nuts.

I am happy to say that everything fit first try. That said, I am going to pop the engine off and re-weld my cross bar on the engine mount. I previously lowered the cross bar in order to clear the sump. I will admit, that when I measured everything up, I never fully mounted the engine mount to the engine. I was looking for about 1/2" of clearance, which I did end up getting... And then I torqued the engine mounts and took the weight off of the engine. I ended up with about 3/32" of an inch when all was said and done. While that may be fine, there is no reason not to re-weld this because it is going to take me all of an hour to take the engine off and put it back on. Plus, since I have procrastinating some building I have been doing a lot of 4130 TIG welding to keep my skills up. 1/16" 2% ceriated tungsten with some 1/16" ER70S-2 does a much better job than my previous 3/32 setup.

B&C OIL FILTER ADAPTER KIT and FS1-14B (Continued)

To use the B&C Oil Filter Adapter with the RV-10, one needs to use the 1.4" spacer kit in order to clear the engine mount. The 1.4" spacer kit comes with 4 new bolts of the proper length. This does mean that the one stud that was originally in the engine case needs to be removed in order to use the new (longer) bolt. While this should normally be an easy task (especially on a new engine), I could not get the stud to budge. You probably know where this is going, but I ended up breaking off the stud after a couple of attempts to double nut this thing out of here.



















At this point I only had 3/4 of a nut of thread length left. I could have put a vise grips onto this and hoped for the best, but in not wanting to have to drill out a stud I opted to weld a nut onto the stud.



In order to locally ground the nut and stud I put a vice grips onto the nut and grounded the vise grips. Based on the layout, the TIG arc jumped to the vise grips a couple of times which caused the smoke you see in the next photo.



All in all though, this worked out well. The stud still came out pretty tough, so I am glad I took this approach rather than risk getting the stud broken off flush.



With the stud out I could now install the spacer, adapter, filter, and alternator. PlanePower has listed right on their website that using spacers larger than .75" may interfere with the FS1-14. I could not find anyone that had any good photos of this combination, so figured "may interfere" would be workable.



As expected, the alternator does in fact interfere with the adapter (in two places). The first place is the safety wire ear on the adapter. This is not really that big of a deal because one could either clock the alternator differently, or grind off the ear (as there are two ears on the bracket).



The next interference point though is a bit more interesting. If you look at the top right bolt in the oil filter adapter you will see that it is perfectly lined up with the boss on the alternator. Each one of the four clocking positions of the alternator line each one of the 4 bolt bosses up with this bolt. A quick and easy fix for this would be to file 1/4" off of the boss. This part of the boss is not even threaded and I am pretty confident wouldn't hurt the structure of the alternator housing.



I debated this for a while, and I am going to scrap the idea of putting the 90 degree adapter on and keep the original straight oil filter housing. My mine thinking on this is two fold. One, the adapter does add another gasket and another place for oil to leak. More importantly though is if I went down the path of modifying the alternator housing, this means that if I ever needed to replace the alternator, that I would have to again make the modification. That is fine and dandy until you are on vacation stuck at some random airport hand filing down an alternator housing.

Fuselage Stand

With the fuselage safe and sound in the shop, next up was a jig to support the fuselage so I could begin work on it. Unlike the wing stands, everyone seems to have their own design for the fuselage stand. Not to be outdone, and wanting to get rid of a bunch of scrap aluminum that has been sitting in the shop I decided to make a metal jig leveraging some wheels from a previous project.



I made the uprights that connect to the center section out of 2x2 1/8 6160 24 inches long. The center section had some nice wood blocks already bolted into them, so I used that for my interface.



With a way to connect the center section to my jig, I started welding up a T structure that would support the wheels. The main structure of the jig was a 64" long  2x2 1/8" square tube that falls directly under the center section and connects to the main wheels and the 24" center section up-rights. The structure heading aft is 1x1 1/8" 6 feet long.



After I had the main T structure built up I ended up going back and re-inforcing all of the 1x1 connections with 1x2 angle. The jig was going to have two front wheels directly under the center section and one rear wheel under the tail, so there shouldn't be that many torquing forces on these joints, but with that said, I had this bad vision in my head of this connection failing sending 1x1 up through my fuselage.



The main structure complete:


This was really an after-thought, but I ended up really liking it. I was not exactly sure where I was going to need support under the belly of the fuselage. I was going to start putting cross braces in the main section heading aft, but I had some 5/4"x10" boards around and it just so happened that I built my structure ~9" wide. So I lag bolted the 10" board to the aluminum structure and everything stiffened up really nicely.



From there, I slide the jig under the fuselage and lifted everything into place. After that I added a couple more bolts to secure the uprights to the jig.



Done! I used a lot of material that was just around the shop and I when with a lot of the lengths that I already had sitting around. The height ended up being perfect and if I were to do it again from drawings, I would dimension everything the same way.