Jur's RV7 Aircraft Factory
3497 hours and counting

After making modifications to the rear bracket, it's time to tackle the forward bracket. The image below is the original bracket as provided by Vans in the baffle kit.
You cannot use that  bracket and you should create 2 new custom brackets that support the front baffles. The location of the hole in the engine is the same but the bracket looks different.

This is the location on the engine where the brackets will come. They support the left and right side front baffle.

these are the front baffles from the Bill lane plenum, so not to be confused for builders who have the standard Vans baffles.

First I started cutting some 0.063" alu stock sheet and made the bend. The bend needs to have a large radius here. There is a serious amount of stress caused by the engine vibration and sharp bends are a garantee for cracks down the road.
Using a simple small bending brake and home equipment it's not as straightforward to create a bending that has a certain radius.
 I found a good way to do this in an easy way. I took a socket wrench which has an outer radius close to the bending radius I wanted and squeezed that on the aluminum while bending. It create this nice radius on the aluminum bracket.
I have deliberatly left the ears on both sides to long so I could start filing away material from the short ear so that the bracket butts nicely on the front baffle and mates nicely with the bolt location on the engine.
I gradually reduced the length and then made sure I rounded down the lower part. There is not a lot of space there so go gentle to keep sufficient material after drilling the #12 hole for the bolt.

Then Clamped the bracket in place with cleco clamps. You can see in the image what I ment above with filing and rounding down the length and bottom rounded corner.
Once I was happy with the alignment, I used a #12 bushing and put it through the engine bolt hole and drilled a #40 hole in the bracket.
I would recommend using a bushing. it's a scary idea havig to put a twist drill through an engine case hole and drill away.
The bushing gives me a perfect centered hole which I enlarged off the engine on the workbench to #12. 
In the image above you can see the bushing I used was a piece of aluminum tube which was a little undersize and I just wrapped some painters tape around it which placed it snug in the engine bolt hole. 

Then drilled the pilot holes #40 for the #8 screws in the front arm of the bracket. This requires some planning as you will need to be able to mount 2 K2000-08 one ear nutplates diagonally on the bracket.

Then updrilled the holes for #8 screws, and temporarily screwed the nutplates on so I could use the nutplates as templates for drilling the ear rivets.

It looks like this with the #8 screws in place

Then drilled then pasenger side the same way.

Behind the scenes look. The bolt in the engine case has become to short to accomodate the extra thickness of the 2 brackets. There will be an additionalwasher between the engine case and the bracket as well. I have ordered a longer bolt at spruce: SUPERIOR MS90725-13 BOLT (Part# 08-10875 MFR Model# MS90725-13).

The  drilled the remaining nutplate ears, deburred the holes, countersunk the ear holes and cleaned the edges.

 I test mounted the plenum cover and discovered som interference with the vertical flange of the plenum roof.

 I marked the interference on the flange and will file it clear of the bracket. No issue with strength, there is an aluminum doubler behind the flange.

 After some tweaking this is how it looked like, the other side has less interference and only needed minimal adjustments

 Nut plates installed, these are ready for painting and final installation.

Ended the day with the traditional assembly picture, this time with the front baffle brackets installed.

The standard Vans baffle kit comes with a support bracket that attaches the rear baffles to the engine using 2 top engine case bolts via the CB-707D bracket.

The Bill Lane plenum ends up lower than the Vans system that uses rubber sealings near the top of the cowling.
Bill Lane plenum has a half inch spacing between the plenum top and the cowling top. Things are already more thight with the Sam James cowl compared to the Vans cowling and this lowered plenum leads to a situation where the support bracket is too high. I have to modify this angle and come up with a modified version.

I have cut off the top of the support angle and will use the remainder. 

 After cuting of the top, I also cut off the flange. This will be replaced by a customised angle out of 0.063" stock angle.

The image below shows the angle attached to the bracket underneath the plenum cover. The difficulty in this is to position the angle on the bracket and have a nice butting connection to the rear baffle.
As this is far underneath the cover, there is no way to hold this or change it while the lid is on.You'll have to remove the plenum top, adjust the clamps and try again until it lays flat on the rear baffle.

 After a couple of iterations I got it right and drilled a couple of #40 holes through the support angle on the engine. This fixates the position of the rear angle.

There are 2 # 12 holes already in the rear baffle. The top one is the one that has the nutplate on the plenum cover above the support bracket. I replaced this #8 nutplate by a AN3 nutplate and will install a bolt through that hole in the plenum top.
Then I reused the lower #12 to matchdrill the angle and drilled an additional #12 hole between the 2. Temporarily fixated it with bolts and castle nuts.

 Here is the result before rivetting after rounding down the corners of the support bracket angle.

 Used some AN470AD4 rivets to attach the angle to the bracket.

Next I made some more aluminum doublers to strengthen the nutplate connections of the diffusers. I glued them in place with some west system epoxy and 406 colloidal sillica to thicken the epoxy.
As before, I'll have to ream the holes again after glueing as the epoxy closes the holes in the epoxy again. The method I use is first use a deburring tool to free the contours of the existing holes in the aluminum strip and then use a reamer to open it up again as it was without enlarging the holes.

A big day again in my project. Nothing substantially done but I have hung the propellor on the engine prop hub for the first time.
I kind of wanted an idea how everything would fit together and what is delivered by Catto with the propellor, spinner and saber extention.

I have a 4 inch Saber extention, spool type. This is required for the Sam James cowling installation.
It took a couple of tries to find the way to do this but it's pretty self explanatory once you understand things. The spinner is predrilled and cut and the holes in the spinner plate are also made with nutplates installed. This makes it pretty simple.

Short bolts hang the spool to the prop hub behind the starter flywheel. You bolt these in in a star pattern. I am just doing this temporarily so there is no torqueing involved yet. This will come of a zillion of times. The long bolts holding the propellor and everything forward of the spool extentions are very long. The threads also extend quite far through the extension. This is probably for having enough space if an additional weight plate has to be added up front.

Here is a view with the prop bolted on. This is pretty damned cool seeing this a first time.

Front picture.

Milestone day ! 
This is one of those days that you know mark the timeline of building your airplane. The moment you hang the engine in the engine mount.
After many days of thinking about missing any things on the firewall, I came to the conclusion that this is the right moment to hang the engine and move on to the firewall forward work. There are some more things I need to do on the firewall, but it's not possible to be sure about the exact location to drill large holes in the firewall until I can actually evaluate the position with the engine in place. i'm thinking of the mixture and throttle cable and alternate air cable. Other than those, I'm pretty sure everything on the firewall is in place.

The same thinking goes for the rear of the engine case. Make sure the 45° restrictor fitting for the oil pressure is mounted in the engine case prior to hanging the engine. It's almost impossible to install this once the engine is on the engine mount. Mine was already installed by PMM during engine assembly. While you are at it, also install the other oil cooler fittings in the engine case (in and out). These can also be done later but it's easier now.

First step was to remove the safety straps that held the engine to the wood pallet that was used for transport. I want to keep track of how this was done as this engine is a brand new engine that has not yet been on the test bench. When all is ready, I will need to unhook the engine and bring it to PMM Wingservice to have it running on the test bench for a first time. This has the disadvantage of extra work on removing the engine and all connections again and having to do it again after it has been run. On the other hand, the major advantage is that I do not have to worry about corrosion and idle time of the engine as it has not yet been running. The cylinders are as if they would be in a stock location on a bench waiting for an engine. There has been no movement of the cylinder heads on the cylinder walls and everything has an oil film on it as delivered from Superior Air Parts. Whether building takes me another 3 years or just 1, it won't matter. I'm gladly willing to take that extra work knowing there is no pressure.

The engine was protected well on the front and rear crankcase and supported in the front under the front with some wood block supports. I'll have to keep all this in stock so that I can re use it in the same way when I bring the engine back to PMM.

Using the engine hoist, we pulled it up, removed the pallet and moved it over to the front of the airplane. Alain helped me on this task to keep the engine in position. It's best having some extra hands around when you do this as the engine is heavy and the bolts are not always willing to go in as easy as you think it would. 

The last part of the moving is the most critical as you don't want your magneto's or fuel pump to bump into the engine mount. Having one person moving and another one guiding the engine is no luxury.

Also notice I leveled the airplane in flight mode. This is much easier to position the engine than if it would be sitting on all tyres which would require you to position the engine at an angle. This leveled way makes it much easier.

I found some documentation online from someone who did this before and described the process. I studied this carefully and upfront, had a close look at the barry mounts and dyna bolt set. You can read it following this link https://www.myrv14.com/buildlog/20150917/Engine_Hanging.pdf. Vans Aircraft also has some drawings available which are not part of the standard plan set that you receive with the kit. 

Study the plans carefully, the barry mounts have to be positioned so that the engine rests on the compression side in the bottom and the compression side in the back on the top mounts. The compression barry mounts are the ones that have a step in the rubber. The non compression ones don't have the ribble on it and look like plain rubber. If I remember well, the non compression ones also are a little larger. Also take care that the washers are in the correct locations. The barry mounts come with one big washer in the box. It's good to assemble the order of all this before starting to move the engine and have thing prepared well. I colored the position of the large washer red in the picture above.

There are 2 lengths in the dyna bolt kit. 2 x AN7-43A and 2 x AN7-44A. The longer ones go on the bottom side, the shorter ones go on the top. The difference is not much more than the length of one of the washers.

Start with the 2 top bolts. The first one is very easy... tighten the bolt but don't torque it yet, you'll probably have to loosen them again working on the bottom bolts.
You do need to tighten the first so that the barry mounts compress allowing the other hole to come in line with the engine case. Remember this is a dynafocal mount, the bolts point inwards. If the bolt is not tightened enough on one side, it's impossible to insert the second one. As you tighten the bolts, the barry mounts compress and also position themselves in the engine mount. That's important.

What I found very annoying is that you can't put a socket on the bolt head as the engine mount is in the way.  I used an extension on the wrench but that didn't make it easier.

The engine sometimes needs a bit of persuasion to get it in position :) Although I don't think this did much. Found out later it's more important to tigthen the other side and use the engine hoist to lower or lift the engine a bit in order to get a bolt in.

The large washer goes between the compression mount and the crankcase as a spacer for the bottom mounts. On the top mounts, I have put that washer on the compression mounts under the bolt head as you can see in the image below. The image has both top bolts in place and tightened.

From there on, things went less smooth and it took about an hour or 2 before I got the last bolt in so I did not take any more pictures until it was done.

I'll try to describe the further process I took.

As both top bolts were tightened, I lifted the engine a bit using the engine hoist. This allowed me to slip the barry mounts between the case and the engine mount. Don't forget the large washer between the barry cookie and the engine case. Don't forget the compression side of the barry mounts is against the engine for the bottom mounts. Then I lowered the engine again and after some wiggling I was able to put the 3rd bolt in. I did have to loosen the top bolts a bit though. 

The fourth bolt is the most difficult one. Looking with a mirror through the hole there was no way the bolt would go in. After a lot of moving up and down, I finally discovered my problem : the washer between the barry mount and the engine case was not aligned and the pressure on it is high enough that it makes it hard to move it. After lifting the engine a bit and tapping on it, I could get it more or less into place. 
A second trick I used was to take an old bolt which was smaller in size and grind down into a guide pin. Once I could slide that smaller bolt in, I was able to wiggle it around in order to get that washer and the engine hole into alignment. I put some grease on the final bolt shank and finally was able to put it in with only very light tapping of a rubber hammer.

I was feeling relieved as I bolted the final nut on that fourth bolt.

As final step, I torqued the bolts. These are AN7 which take 450 - 500 inch/lbs. I used the middle value of 480 inch/lbs. The engine will still need to come off as mentioned earlier but the position of the engine is very important when installing the cowling so I torqued it to the final value.

Took some pictures of the plane with the engine in place. This surely is a big milestone and is a "feel good" moment during the build.

Happy camper...

As I had some time left, I took out the fuel throttle body. This comes with a plastic spacer.

The orientation of the throttle body was a bit of a mystery at first but soon figured out what side was the throttle lever and which side the mixture. 
In the image below I installed it on the forward horizontal induction air intake at the cold sump of the engine. In the image below, the throttle lever is the gold colored arm.

Finally I covered the intake with some paper and masking tape in order not to get foreign objects entering the engine.

End of a productive day was off course celebrated with Alain with a good strong Belgian HQ beer.