Lower Cowl (4)

4 hours

Getting started on the fiberglass cowl.  First I covered up the engine with garbage bags so it wouldn't get covered in fiberglass dust.

Then I roughly cut the prop hub opening out.  Next I maneuvered the cowl approximately into place to see where it interfered with the gear legs.  I made some marks and measurements, and then made a small cutout on each side.  That allowed me to get the cowl somewhat in place and adjust the openings more later.

The first point to fix in place is the very front where the cowl surrounds the prop hub.  I just used wood screws to temporarily attach the front to the back side of the wood spacer.  Then I used a bunch of masking tape to hold the back side roughly in place.

It took a few iterations of fitting the cowl, and removing it partially to file away little areas that interfered with the gear legs or the fuselage side panels.  Eventually I got it to fit pretty well on both sides.

The most trimming I had to do wasn't even that much, I had to just file maybe 1/8" off this top aft edge:

Once it was looking pretty good I drilled the side hinges to the cowl.  There was enough room inside the cowl to get about half of the holes drilled and cleco'd, and then I took the cowl off to drill the rest of them.

Next I'll need to get the bottom edge and hinge fit, and then on to the upper cowl!

Cowl Prep (1)

1 hour

I'm waiting for some more parts to continue on the engine, so in the meantime I'll work on the fiberglass cowl.

Before starting to fit the actual fiberglass parts, I made the three hinges that'll attach it to the fuselage, and this wood spacer which I will use to hold the front of the cowl in place around the prop hub.

I cut it out and had a buddy from work cut the inside out with a router.  Looks like it'll work!

Valvetrain Remediation (2)

2 hours

I got two new pushrods in the mail from a helpful forum member, so I went back to figure out the valvetrain on the right side cylinder head.

I found before that cylinder #3 needed slightly shorter pushrods than #4, so I used the measuring tool again and this time measured the intake and exhaust for #3 separately and made a specific pushrod for each valve.

Here's what I ended up with.  These four pushrods fit each valve on the right head from aft to front (#3 exhaust, #3 intake, #4 intake, #4 exhaust).

The shortest one is about 1/8" shorter than the longest one.  I couldn't find anything wrong with any parts, so I think the difference is just inconsistency within the rocker assembly.

Anyway, with that done I finally got the right head assembled and the valves adjusted.  I had to go buy some slightly shorter bolts for the valve covers too, because the stock ones bottomed out before the covers were on tightly.  So I got that done too.

Initial Turbo Installation (3.5)

3.5 hours

With the exhaust on, I took an initial pass at mounting all the turbo stuff.

The first thing I noticed was that although the instructions say the turbo should be oriented the right way from the factory, it was like 180 degrees off, so I had to re-clock it anyway.  I'm not sure how they could plan on not needing you to do this, because the bearing block needs to be oriented parallel to the floor with the plane on its gear, and I don't think they ever asked me if I'm building a tailwheel or tri-gear plane when I ordered the engine.

Anyway, it's not hard.  To clock the turbo, just consider the exhaust side to be fixed since it'll sit on the exhaust manifold.  There are four bolts you loosen, and then you can rotate the bearing block to be parallel to the floor and then retighten the bolts.  Then you have to squeeze a giant snap ring to rotate the intake side of the turbo relative to the bearing block.

Here's the picture in the manual of what it's supposed to look like, relative to what I got:

Someone posted this on the forum, and I found it to work great, and that is this pair of pliers from Napa:  https://www.napaonline.com/en/p/BK_7743431 .  I ground down the tips a little bit and it had no trouble squeezing the big snap ring enough for me to rotate the turbo.

Here's the bearing block now level with the floor.  It doesn't look exactly level, but it matches the angle my garage floor is at.

With the bearing block level, I adjusted the intake side of the turbo to appriximately the right angle.

I installed the intake manifold parts and did a few more slight adjustments to the turbo angle until everything fit nicely.

The turbo is pretty close to the firewall.

However even with such little clearance the heat shield still fits, which I took as a good sign.  I'm going to add some heat barrier material to the firewall too though for good measure.

The most obvious fitment issue I ran into was the exhaust.  As it sits now the lower exhaust pipe runs into the engine mount.  I think I will need to slightly un-bend the 90-degree elbow to move the lower pipe outboard an inch or so.

Exhaust Manifold (3)

3 hours

The turbo exhaust manifold is a one piece deal that connects all four cylinders to the turbo.  Since the four exhaust ports are all on opposite corners of the engine, there's plenty of room for manufacturing errors.  This thing ended up being a bear to install!

The first step was to get the left and right pairs stretched around each head with the gaskets included.  It was a tight fit on both sides, but much tighter on the left.  It took me at least an hour of wrestling with it just to get them around the heads, not to mention lining up the bolt holes.

Once the flanges were stretched around the heads I started maneuvering everything around to get the bolt holes to line up.  Most of them don't all line up at the same time without some serious pushing and pulling.  Anyway I worked on them one at a time, and several times I got to a point where I realized I needed to remove some bolts so I could move the manifold a different way, and reassemble the bolts in a different order.  It was a pain but eventually I got all of them.  In my case it'll only really have a hope of going together in a certain order, and that seems to be #3 first, then #4, then #1, and #2 last.  Any other order resulted in misaligned holes with no flexibility to get anything to move!  I also found that since the exhaust ports on the heads are pretty flat, it was useful to use clamps to budge the exhaust around for final adjustments.

Here are a bunch of pictures showing the gradual progress:

Here I think you can see what made this so difficult.  Maybe it's meant to be this way, but if you look at the overall manifold, it's kind of biased towards the right side of the plane (left in the photo).  So I think that made it a way tighter fit on the left side.  I wrapped a ratchet strap around the bottom of the manifold and the engine mount to pull everything to the left, and that helped.

Once I got 7 of 8 bolts in, I found another problem which I think stems from what I just said.  You can see here how much space there is between the exhaust and the super tin on the aircraft right side, and on the aircraft left side, it's touching!

Here's a closer view:

I ended up backtracking so I could lower the exhaust enough to trim a little piece off of the super tin on the left side, and that eliminated the interference.  Then I just had to manhandle everything again to get the bolts back in again.

  

Finally all 8 bolts are in!

Alternator, Starter, Intake, Lower Spark Plugs (1.5)

1.5 hours

A few more assorted things before I start on the exhaust and turbo.

I assembled the alternator according to the instructions.  My stator doesn't have the orange potting on it that the instructions and the DVD depict, but it's the right part number so I guess they have updated it.  Anyway the alternator went together without any issues.

Next I installed the starter.  I'll have to remove one of the bolts later to add a ground strap so I left myself a note to remind me to add Loctite and torque the bolts down later.

Finally, I installed both intake elbows on top of the heads.  I think I've read that the intakes can block access to the upper spark plugs, but I double checked and with the included spacers you can get at them without any issues.  I left the upper plugs out for now because I still need to mess with the valves more, but while I was thinking about plugs I went ahead and gapped and installed the lower ones.

Rocker Shafts, Pushrods, and Valves (5)

5 hours

The next step in our journey outwards on the engine was the rocker shafts.  The little mounting blocks have a gap on one side, and the instructions say to place install the shaft with the gaps facing down.  That didn't make sense to me at first, until I realized I could just remove the bolt from each end of the shaft and flip the blocks over.  Then I was able to install the shaft correctly.

In order to place the little swivel pads slightly off-center on each valve stem, I ended up having to use two of the square shims per mounting stud.  Once I got that figured out, I used the pushrod length tool to determine the correct pushrod length for the left side.  Using that as a template, I cut four pushrods to the appropriate length.  I just used a hacksaw to cut them and then filed and deburred the ends.  The little tips were pretty hard to insert.  I ended up heating the end of each pushrod quite a lot with a heat gun, and then hammering the tips on with a plastic hammer.  I'm confident they will definitely never fall out!

Next I put a pushrod in each tube, reinstalled the rocker shaft, and torqued it down.  Then I set the valve clearances per the manual.

Finally I installed the valve cover with its cork gasket.

The other side was not as easy!  It took me a good two hours of trial and error with the square shims, swapping around the round shims on the rocker shaft, and swapping rockers around to finally get all four adjusters lined up properly with the valves.

Then I used the pushrod tool again, on the #4 intake valve, to determine the required length, and I cut all four pushrods to that length.  However, when I assembled everything, I found that both pushrods on cylinder #3 were slightly too long.  I spent a bunch of time investigating how this could be, and I finally narrowed it down to just slightly inconsistent rockers and adjusters between the two cylinders. 

All four pushrods line up, so there's nothing wrong with the lifters:

And all four valves are flush with each other:

So that pretty much isolates the rocker shaft as the source of the differences:

Using the length tool I figured out cylinder 3 just needs pushrods about 1/8" shorter...  It's not much but it's enough to prevent me from backing out the adjusters far enough to set the valve clearances!  I've got some new pushrods on the way and I think that will take care of that.

Trimming Head Studs (1)

1 hour

Once I had the heads preliminarily torqued to 10 ft-lbs, I observed how much excess length remained on each stud.  I had threaded each stud into the case until it bottomed out finger tight, by the way.  I put a dab of paint on each stud to mark how much stuck out past the nuts.

Just like what's shown on the DVD, I had to trim both upper inner studs for the intake manifold, and then all the lower studs except the far left one for the rocker shaft.  So five studs per side.

I just unthreaded the whole stud out of the head, one at a time, and brought each one outside to cut with an angle grinder.  I left a couple of threads past the paint mark and that allowed plenty of room.

Weight savings

Then I brought each one back in, cleaned up the cut end, reapplied sealant to the case end, and reinstalled the stud into the case.  Don't remove the nut from the stud, just thread it all the way down so it's out of the while while cutting.  If you remove it, it could be tricky to thread it back onto the cut end!  Anyway I did that for each stud one at a time, and then I torqued both heads to their final values.