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Matt Dralle's RV-8 Project
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Date: 4-14-2009
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Number of Hours: 8.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Engine Mount, Slick Start, and B&C Regular
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It took a bit longer than I thought it would, but the engine mount is bolted on! The pilot holes in the fuselage are under sized and you have to put the engine mount up on the fuselage and kind of hang it there with a couple of under-sized bolts while you use your drill though the engine mount into the fuselage. The engine mount, however, doesn't quite line up perfectly with the pre-drilled holes. This means that drilling is kind of a trick and requires slightly bending the engine mount to get it to fit up on the bolts. It all kind of sounds worse than it was but it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.
The interesting thing I discovered after putting the engine mount on was that I could pretty easily lift the whole front of the fuselage by the engine mount even with all of the avionics mounted. That's good, because I also discovered that waiting until now to mount the landing gear for the first time was a huge mistake. I had assumed that all of the mounting holes for the landing gear plates were pre-drilled. WRONG. The inside ones are (the easy ones to get to, btw), but the outer ones are not. I went over the installation procedure in the manual a few times and I think I understand the process now, but I've come to the conclusion that doing it with the fuselage in the normal position and laying on the floor and drilling up in to the bottom of the fuselage is pretty much a non-starter. The gear have to be perfectly aligned with plumb bobs to get the toe-in and camber just right and all of that has to be held just so while the outside holes are drilled into the fuselage. Those holes by the way, I believe are 9/16"! That's a huge hole to be drilling while lying on your back pushing a drill up. So, I think to put the gear on I'm going to have to take the tail off, the canopy, and the turtle deck so that the fuselage can be flipped over and put on some saw horse. Probably won't be too big a deal, but certainly a lot more work than I had planned on. I'm going to cut a carpet pattern a
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Engine Mount Bolted On
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B&C Secondary Alt Regulator & Slick Start Module
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Copyright © 2008-2024 Matt Dralle. All Rights Reserved.
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