The Engine Core as Purchased (an O-360A1D)
It lived on a Mooney from 1962 - 1974
and a BD-4 from 1974 - 1984
and was out of service until now.
Overhauled with high compression pistons!
Looks better, huh. He does nice work.
I decided to attach the fuel pressure, oil pressure and Hobbs transducers
to the engine mount. A simple bracket was fabricated out of 16 gauge
hardware store steel for the tachometer transducer.
The mixture and throttle bracket are visible here. Vans has a different bracket for the O-360 but the older O-320 bracket worked fine. Like some other builders I was unable to get absolute full throw of the mixture cable, but it should be enough.
Visible is the starter vibrator box, the primer solenoid and the beginnings of the gascolator setup. I hope to run a short tube down to a drain valve from the gascolator for fuel sumping.
This engine has a Hartzell prop governor, the bracket from vans does not fit. I made this cable bracket out of .063 aluminum angle and hardware store steel.
Here is how the Gascolator setup finally worked out. The fuel sump drain valve bracket had extend forward far enough to clear the recently installed cowling attach hinge.
The airbox was a bit of a tricky affair. First, it was suprising how much the box had to be angled to the right to align the opening with the cowl inlet. I had to be careful to keep good edge distances to attach it to the carb base plate. Second, both the aluminum the airbox top and the fiber glass bowl had to cut and bent for vertical alignment with the cowl inlet.
I had to buy more foam from the local flower shop to make the mold for the cowl to airbox fiberglass duct as the foam is very fragile and it took a couple of attempts to make a satisfactory mold. The duct only ended up adding about an inch to the cowl to bring it to the specified 1/4" distance rom the airbox.
Cooling Baffles
The baffles are amazingly time consuming. Each part has to be iteratively trimmed to size to fit the engine, details added, top edge trimmed to match up up with a 3/8" gap between the cowl and finally airseal fabric sized cut and attached. Van's new RV-9A shows a nifty "box rib" to straighten out the back edge of the baffle and remove two airseal fabric folds (potential leaky areas). A failed attempt to build this part out of aluminum led me to experiment with one made form wood...But I finally succeeded with aluminum.
The oil cooler is attached to the left rear of the baffle per the
instructions. I added a .063" strip for the inboard attach bolts to
stiffen the installation. 3/8" lines will be tried at first (had some old
ones). If it runs hot, I'll switch to 1/2".
Visible is the cut in the fiberglass bowl required for vertical alignment of the airbox with the cowl inlet. I later glassed over the gap to restore its integrity in the new position.
This Shows the Oil cooler installation and the nifty Box Rib