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The second attempt at an oil cooler mount worked much better than the first one. I adjusted the dimensions slightly the second time around, which allowed me to position the cooler further inboard and higher. The lower part of the cooler will be below the top of the cylinder fins, so it will not get a direct blast of air. But the bottom end of the cooler is 1.25 inches aft of the back baffle, so that will allow room for the air to get at it.

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Yesterday I went to a metal supply house and picked up some 0.063 sheet to reinforce the back baffle where the oil cooler will mount. This morning I roughed out the doubler.This afternoon I taped a piece of wood on top of the flywheel to support the front of the upper cowling at the correct height, and then put temporarily put it in place. Normally, the lower cowling is put on first, and it holds the front of the upper cowling in position. I wanted to have the upper cowling only, so I could reach up underneath to see how the oil cooler and mount would fit.I discovered that my first cut at an oil cooler mount can probably be improved. If I tweak some of the dimensions a bit I can mount the oil cooler a bit higher than I can with the first iteration of the design.I realized that I could use the 0.093 thick 2 inch by 1 inch C-channel that I had originally purchased to fabricate the mount if I sliced it into pieces, and bolted the pieces together. This will be lighter and simpler than my original design.

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Well, the oil cooler mount is slowly coming together. There isn't a lot of space between back of the baffles, the engine mount and the upper cowling. I want to get the oil cooler as high as possible, which means it has to move inboard due to the curvature of the upper cowling. But, it starts to interfere with the engine mount as you move it inboard. The whole thing is further complicated by my desire to space the cooler a bit aft of the back baffle, to allow air to come over the top of the cylinder, and down between the back baffle and the cooler to flow through the lower half of cooler. I've had to trim corners off the flanges on the cooler so it doesn't hit the engine mount on the right side or the curved upper surface of the cowling on the left.


The oil cooler mount is made from pieces of 0.125 inch aluminum angle bolted together. It is less deep at the bottom, to better clear the engine mount. The bolts that attach the cooler to the mount are not the correct ones. I will be using much longer bolts that go through both the forward and rear flanges, with a spacer in between.

A long awaited box from Aircraft Spruce arrived today. It had a bunch of miscellaneous hardware, plus the ACK A-30 altitude encoder. I always feel like a kid at Christmas unwrapping these boxes.

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I've been messing around the last few days puzzling out an oil cooler mount. I've got the main parts fabricated, but I'm still sorting out the details of a sliding door I want to have between the engine and the oil cooler. I plan to fly in the winter, and it gets pretty cold up here, but the temperatures can vary significantly from day to day. So I don't want to have some sort of cover over the oil cooler that I have to install or remove depending on the temperature. I want a sliding door that I can control from the cockpit to meter how much air gets to the oil cooler. I thought I had it all figured out until I noticed a bolt head that is in the way of where the door was to slide. So, back to the drawing board. I'll post some pictures once I get it figured out.

I had to spend a bunch of time today digging a big hole in the back yard. I think our septic tank may be full, so I had better get that sorted out before winter hits too hard.

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Sunday I attacked the right baffle floor piece. I had to make a hole to allow the oil line for the propeller pitch control to pass through. It took a bit of work with the drill, nibbler, file and sandpaper, but it came out fine.


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I ran a poll a few days ago on font size. The results indicated that about 30% of the viewers found the default theme to have too small a text size. The default theme defines fonts by number of pixels, which makes it easy to know how much room the text will take up, but apparently some browsers won't scale up the font sizes if the viewer selects Larger Text from the View menu.

So, I created another set of themes that specifically send text at the default font size set in each viewer's browser. These themes have a "2" at the end of the name.

Viewers can select the various themes by using the Theme Changer menu at the top right. If you find one you prefer to the default, you need to log in as a user - then you can set your preferred theme and the system will return to it each time you log in.