Month: January 2023

I was worried about my brake lines overheating. So I purchased this thermal wire protectant tube… It’s the same thing as exhaust wrap. But it comes already in a tube, kind of like a straw. I slid that over the bottom of my brake lines. Where they touch the caliper. The thought process here is it’ll keep the end of the brake lines from heating up and traveling up to the plastic brake line.

On my interior on the bottom under the dash against the console… Those panels screw on and off with button head screws. Because I have to take them on and off periodically to do maintenance, I didn’t want to have to try to find holes in carpeting. So I cut the carpeting into strips so where the screws are, carpeting is not. I think it still looks good because it’s under the dash and it’s dark down there so you can’t see it and it will make ongoing maintenance a whole lot easier.

Oil and coolant radiator. Done. That’s all that needs to be said about that. It was literally the easiest thing I’ve done on the plane so far. Wrap the hoses with heat protectant wrap, attach done.

I hid the ELT antenna between the canopy in the rear fuselage, as pictured.

Yesterday I marked up the propeller to ensure that it fit. I had to do a lot of measurements based upon Mt propellers PDF. I cut my cowling on speculation according to those PDF measurements months ago. A long time before I actually got the prop. And thank goodness it came out good. 11 mm clearance.

That’s it for today.

This would have been done a couple months ago but I’m still waiting on my parachute. So I find myself dragging my feet to finish up my last couple tasks. I suppose it’s a mixed blessing. It allows me to be a perfectionist and proceed very slowly.

I recently ran the radiator and oil hoses. I reran them a couple times to get it perfect. I kept changing the exact path to keep them away from the exhaust as much as possible and to eliminate sharp turns. I also used a different heat resistant wrap than comes with the plane. I used more of an automotive exhaust wrap. It is virtually the same. It is still a glass insulation weaved wrap. But it’s about twice as thick. The temperature resistance is much higher on the wrap I used. Not satisfied with simple published specifications. I did perform a heat test on the provided wrap and the new one I bought. I exposed to them both to a torch and and compared with an IR thermometer. And the automotive exhaust wrap did a lot better.

I found a hole from the interior of the plane into the parachute storage area. And the parachute storage area is not sealed tightly most likely because the top has to blow off. Anyway that little hole in the back of the compartment concerned me that the warm air from the interior of the plane would leak into it and out. So I plugged it. I made sure it is smooth on the inside so the parachute would not catch on it. Not in the pictures below but I ended up adding some filler over top of it and seeing it down to make it super smooth.