So as alluded to last time, the work since then has revolved around nailing down the battery box mount layout. Basically, I did some incremental trimming on the mount plate I rough-cut last time out, and then transferred some of the location lines I’d drawn on the firewall onto it – stuff like rivet locations and a line I drew to approximate where I wanted the battery box to go.
This mount is actually going to sort of do double duty – in addition to mounting the battery box, I’ll be mounting the master and starter contactors on this plate as well. So that makes for some additional layout work to be done, much of which I was firming up earlier this week.
Today i transitioned into figuring out exactly how I wanted to mount the plate to the firewall. The general plan has always been to remove a few of the existing rivets and enlarge their holes for bolts instead. Today I was figuring out which of these existing holes to use – ensuring I picked ones that wouldn’t interfere with the battery or the contactors, roughing out those locations on the plate, double-checking things…let’s just say “multiple” times.
Finally, I was happy with the rough layout, to the point that I felt like it was time for the engine to get out of the way – so I brought over the engine fixture and pulled that beast off, hopefully for the last time. With it out of the way, I can get to work on finalizing a few different firewall items. The most obvious of these are the battery mount and pressure manifold, but there were also a couple rivet hole that I never filled before for some reason, plus I want to fit the eyeball passthroughs for the control cables. So my first order of business after removing the engine was to mark up all this stuff on the firewall, as a sort of visual checklist.
Those missing rivets got taken care of first up, then I moved to removing the rivets where the battery mount holes will go. With those out of the way, it seemed like a good time to call it a night. The next order of business will be to figure out how to hold the mount in place while I use the rivet holes to drill #30 pilots into the mount – that will fix its location, and once that’s done I’ll drill them to final size, then get to finalizing the mount itself.