Tonight was just putting the finishing touches on this mount, or at least most of them. I wanted to get all the lightening holes cut, but I can’t “finish” finish it until I have the nutplates I’m missing, and I’m going to wait until I also know the mount bolts I need so I can combine Spruce orders.
I did spend some time thinking through the layout of the holes, and I ended up massaging the large hole behind the battery a bit, and then laying out just a few smaller holes in the area below the battery box. There wasn’t any room for useful holes anywhere else, at least while still leaving what I felt was enough material. Probably this thing is way beefier than it needs to be, but such is the nature of eyeball engineering – better safe than sorry.
Anyway, the large hole got cut with my hole cutter, but the smaller ones I did with a large step drill. The hole cutter is nice, but I don’t have quite the precise control over hole size that I get with the step drill. All that step drilling generated a pretty big pile of aluminum fuzz:
And here’s the mostly-finished mount:
So now I’ll set this aside and do the rest of the firewall stuff, which at this point is limited to the manifold mount holes and the eyeball passthroughs for the control cables. Hopefully by this weekend I’ll be hanging the engine…again…