So…let’s start with the fun part. Tonight I actually started over from scratch with the battery mount. I guess it’s a good thing I bought two pieces of .063 for this work. Basically, the problem I ran into was that my late-breaking idea to put spacers between the mount and the firewall caused other issues.
The first thing is that this pushes the mount closer to the lower engine mount tube, increasing the chance that the battery box might interfere…and I can’t easily verify this without remounting the engine (again). This problem is compounded by the decision to use bolts to attach the box to the mount – originally I had the box sitting pretty close to the contactors, but this layout would cause the starter contractor to interfere with the attach bolt for the box. Fixing this would require moving the box lower – which would again increase the chances of interfering with the engine mount tube.
With that in mind, I decided to change things up a bit. Instead of putting the contactors above the battery box, I’ll put them below it. This pushes the battery box higher, providing more leeway between the box and engine mount. It’ll also allow for some nicer routing of other cables – I’m going to move the ANL fuse holder and ammeter shunt down to that lower mount tube as well, which will allow for a very short cable run from the contactor to the fuse holder. This, in turn, will minimize the length of unfused cable, which is definitely a good thing.
So – back to building. The first step was to transfer the mount-firewall bolt hole locations to the new raw sheet piece. Then I got to repeat the exercise of tinkering with placement of everything until I liked the layout, and making the needed mount holes. This time, I started with the battery box attach points, then worked off of that to position the contactors. The rough layout can be seen below:
Next, it was time to start sketching up the actual outside of the mount. Here I basically just worked between the mount holes and tried to remove as much unnecessary material as possible. I got as far as rough-cutting the outline before calling it a night:
There’s going to be a fair amount more work to do here, easing up to the actual lines, smoothing out a bunch of rough cut sides, and so forth, but another good night’s work probably ought to do it. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to do any more lightening hole besides the large one outlined above – I can probably fit a few more in here and there, but I don’t want to remove too much material.
I’ve also got to order even more stuff from Spruce before I can finish this. I used my last few 1/4” nutplates with the previous mount iteration, so I don’t have any to install here for the contractor mounts. Guess maybe I’ll put together an order tonight, though to be honest I don’t need this stuff right now – it could wait a bit. Pretty sure I can at least mock everything up well enough to work up cables and such. Eh, we’ll see…