So yeah, not exactly a super productive evening. The sort of infinite recursion of dependencies is not playing well with my inherent tendency to overthink everything. I started out tonight thinking I’d hash out the exhaust hanger setup, but that didn’t go too well. There’s a whole debate around how best to secure the exhaust on these planes. Most people us a hanger setup that consists of two pieces of tubing, with the ends flattened and drilled for bolts, and joined together with a short piece of rubber tubing to provide some flexibility. Vetterman suggests securing one end to the exhaust and the other to an engine mount tube, but this seems to frequently lead to cracked hangers. So folks instead suggest securing the other end of the hanger to the engine itself, but the ones provided with the exhaust are too short for this.
That doesn’t even get into the other question of where on the exhaust pipes to secure the hangers. To figure this out on the #1 and 3 cylinders, I have to look at where to put the cabin heat muff. That probably needs to go as far forward as possible, but the next question is how the scat tubing for the heat muff inlet is routed. That got me pulling parts of the baffling out, which made me realize that’ll I need to rework a brace for the baffles due to both the case-top ignition coil mount and the injector tubes, as well as worrying about whether the case-top coil might hit the cowl.
This is a really long and drawn-out way to say that I’m not going to work not he exhaust right now. The baffling seems like the most pertinent thing to get going on, so I’m going to switch gears to that. In the meantime, I decided to switch to shop cleanup for the rest of the night. My big work table is a disaster, and there’s a bunch of crap piled on top of the finish kit crate. I want to be able to spread some stuff out on the table, and also pull the cowling halves out so I have them on hand for rough fitment checks.
Things sure aren’t spic-and-span as of yet, but I made good progress. I suppose I’ll keep going on that tomorrow, though I’ll have some electrical stuff coming in, so I might also fab up some more cables – there’s some stuff I can do there that’s not dependent on 40 other things…I think.