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!