So, I’m pretty happy tonight – I worked out a problem that’s been nagging at me for a while. Previously I’ve mentioned how one of the injector lines interfered with the case top mount for the SDS coil pack, and a while back I took a crack at making a custom mount out of some angle. While the mount itself turned out OK, I discovered while fitting the top cowl that the mount was too tall, causing the coil pack to contact the cowl.
I’ve been rolling around ways to address this for a while. I’d initially thought about making a new custom mount that sat lower, but since the whole idea of that mount was to let the injector line pass below it, there wasn’t really any room to make much of a difference. This week I got back to brainstorming how to handle this, and eventually I decided I only had two real options: either relocate the injector line, or put the coil pack somewhere else. Mocking the coil pack up on the other magneto pad wasn’t encouraging; between the oil pressure sender line and the CS prop oil line, it’s pretty tight back there.
So I went on a research journey on the topic of these injector lines, starting with the intent to buy the materials needed to make a new line. It turns out that these lines can be bought prefabricated, in whatever length you need, and they’re hand-bent to the required routing. That indicated to me that simply massaging the routing of the line I had was a reasonable way to approach this, so I started down that road.
The good news is that this line had enough slack in it to allow for the rerouting I had in mind. A little more bend at the flow divider allowed the line to cross the case a couple inches further forward, in front of the SDS case top mount. I was able to reuse the previous retention mount on the side of the coil mount, thus securing the line just past the case split. Further over, the adel clamps already in place on the pushrod tube still worked just fine.
With the coil pack loosely in place on the mount, we can see the routing. The main area of concern while I was doing this was the spot in this photo – the clearance between that bend and the coil pack mount. I was able to get about an inch of clearance without violating the minimum bend radius specs for this line:
From the other side, we can see how the nice billet mount was reused to secure the line:
This was very satisfying, but it left one more question: supporting the rear baffle. Normally, there’s a brace that goes from the case top to the baffle, but the coil pack mount precludes using that. I’d been planning on figuring some way to brace from my custom mount to the baffle, but hadn’t really worked it out. Since I had the coil pack mocked up in place, I decided to put in the baffles to see how things looked. It turns out that the baffles are close enough to the coil pack that this will be an easy problem to solve – I can just use a small piece of angle to tie the baffle into this mount screw on the coil pack.
I still need to go back and permanently mount all this stuff – for example, the coil pack mount bolts are only hand-tight right now. They’ll need lock washers and torquing as well. I suppose I can go ahead and bolt the coil pack itself in place as well; that way I can double-check the cowl clearance next time I put the top cowl on.
I’m somewhat tempted to quit working on cowl fitting for the time being, and get back to general FWF cable routing and so forth. The whole reason I started on the cowl was to allow working on the baffles, which I guess I’ll still need to resume before I can finish off all the FWF stuff. I think I’m just trying to avoid that whole fiberglass + sweat situation, but there’s not going to be any way around that for probably another four months or so.