Lindy
1/11/2010
Seems like a long time between work sessions this time, but I guess it was only four days...anyway, tonight I finished the spinner! I countersunk all the screw holes for Tinnerman washers (no pic). Then I started working on the smoke oil tank. It's a system that is barely started (the switch and light are in and wired), and I need to get about doing the rest of it at some point, so why not start now? I plan to use an expired O2 bottle that came out of one of our airplanes at work. It's a fairly big tank, so I can make it pretty much any size, depending on where I decide to put it. Here is the tank after cutting off the top. I was very pleased to find out that this is an aluminum tank with fiberglass wrapping...I thought it was going to be all fiberglass.
I plan to make an aluminum lid for it that will get Prosealed in place after I have the tubes run in to it and make a filler port.
Just for starting location planning, I snapped a pic of it to show the actual size of the tank at the one location in front of the firewall where it could possibly go...depending on the final size of the tank, and what advise I get about this spot. The marks don't mean anything...they were for marking the location of the straps used to mount it in the airplane it came out of.
That's where I stopped with that tonight because I need to find a location for it, and I need to grab the rest of the smoke system stuff from the hangar to continue...also need to pick up a fuel pump and solenoid for it.
So at this point, I started to flip back thru the build manual to check off things I had done without reading the manual (exhaust, prop selection, engine choice...) and the stuff that didn't pertain to my build (Van's cowl for example). I found one thing tonight that I hadn't done that needed to be done. Back when I was just starting the FWF stuff after the engine had been hung, I installed the crankcase breather tube. Come to find out, the instructions do say to add a small hole a few inches above the exit in order to mitigate a clog or otherwise frozen tube, closing it. So I drilled a #30 hole about three inches or so from the bottom. Without this, if the tube were to become clogged, it could blow the front crank seal, and oil pressure would drop to a point where the engine would probably fail. Not a good thing...I like that hole.
More reading of the manual after this...I'm really getting close to being ready to start the engine, but I won't do that until it gets warm out again. So next time, it'll be back to work on the smoke system I suppose...or something else like rigging control surfaces, or hooking up the rudder cables...etc...
2.0 hours