Engine & Avionics!

On Dec 3rd, my final crate arrived with the entire avionics kit and firewall forward kit.  I didn’t have much time to do anything with it, as my daughter and her family had just arrived from Louisiana to visit. Nonetheless, I managed to snap a few pics as it arrived, and then as I took it apart a little bit.  At the time of this posting, I haven’t done any inventory of the parts.  That will have to wait for a few weeks (work schedule from hell, plus the sad trip to Phoenix for the funeral of my nephew).  Speaking of waiting for weeks, I have done some work on the control systems in the last two weeks, but no pages were completed, thus no documentation.

 

Engine & Avionics crate

 

Engine crate

 It’s like a матрёшка doll—open it and find another inside!  This is the engine crate.

 

Engine, ready to be unwrapped

Unwrapped Engine, top view 

Unwrapped Engine, side view

I’m probably not going to work on this for a while.  It was challenging to get it out of the double crate, and I want to be able to have some mobility until I hang it on the plane.  Nick (Big Nick, fiancé to my daughter, Melena) helped with the labor & lifting. To gain the mobility,  I turned the small crate over and used a big drill and a jig saw to cut out the base of the crate that held the tapped lugs and just rebolted the engine to the crate floor after quickly attaching some wheels.  (The wheels were scavenged off of the no-longer-needed frame that I use to build up the fuselage.)  The engine is now wrapped in a sheet and resting quietly beneath the fuselage until I can get back to work on it.

Big Nick

Addendum 12/18/14

I finished unpacking everything and getting it all inventoried.  The only things that I was missing in the kits was the documentation re: the contents of 5 bags.  I got those by email and did my last check only to find that I’m missing just one piece: ”Al Bushing 0.197 x 0.313 x 0.968" .  The other “gotcha” was that they sent me a European transponder.  I actually got a phone call from Daryl who apprised me of the problem before I even opened up the boxes.  He said I could use their UPS shipper number, but the local UPS store said I’d have to drive to the main office an hour away.  I sent it FedEx instead.