Ok, I know it may not seem like such a huge ordeal, but before I stowed this engine hoist away I wanted to ensure it was working properly.  As you saw from a couple of weeks ago, I had added a full bottle of hydraulic oil to the jack so that the jack would stay up & not move with a load on it.

No joy!

I eventually had to buy more hydraulic fluid and bingo, that did the trick!  After a few days of working the jack & bleeding the air out I finally got this lemon to work!

With the drama over, I folded it up and took a pic before it went into the storage closet.

BTW, I used over a third of the hydraulic fluid from the bottle shown in the pic.  Now that this is out of the way, I should be able to finish up the shop SOON and get moving on the build.  As many of you know, working in a tight space requires a fair amount of organization!

Getting there . . .

I stopped by my old Aeroclub at Tipton Airfield near Ft. Meade today to visit the old gang. I got my PPL here many years ago.  It was great to see some of the guys that were around while I flew there, but I was sad to see an old friend–the Cessna T-41 that I soloed in–sitting in a hangar after being parted out.  Apparently it was smacked hard in a vicious windstorm that hit the airport a couple of years back.  The tail assembly was banged up pretty good, to the point that the tail boom was misaligned so much that it was uneconomical to repair.

 Fairwell N7893N!

I just got this in the mail… my awesome new license plate for the truck!

Hoo-ah!  :)

I can’t really finish the shelves or the glass cabinet until I get the epoxy hotbox knocked out.

Once the back wall was in place, I started on the bottom shelf.  Now the hotbox will be insulated all the way around, with both 1″ Styrofoam and aluminum covered foam used in building houses.

I installed edges for the bottom shelf “tray” to sit on:

Now, the pain involved with building the hotbox is that it takes a fair amount of time to cut the Styrofoam insulation pieces.  Luckily I had retrieved the hotwire cutter that I built back in early 2011 from storage at my buddy Marco’s shop.  This made the insulation cutting a lot quicker and cleaner!

Below are 2 pieces of 1″ foam inserted into bottom shelf area and sitting upon the shelf tray built above:After installing the bottom shelf-top, I then had to refine my measurements for the epoxy jug storage on the bottom shelf and the quart & bottle containers of hardener on the top shelf to place the middle shelf.

The epoxy you see here is MGS 335 that I had left with my buddy Marco to use if he wanted.  Being busy on his build and machining projects, he never really used it, so I’ll play around with it on some non-aircraft/non-structural projects.

I then insulated the back and side walls, and installed the light bulb heating elements.

Finally, I finished insulating the top of the hotbox as I did the bottom shelf, and will use the actual top shelf sheeting to cover the upper 2″ foam insulation pieces.

So I’m back in my old house in Virginia.  Actually a different house than where I started the Long-EZ project back in 2011.  Since I won’t be getting my household goods or my plane parts for another couple of weeks, I figured I would get the garage shop prepped as much as possible to minimize the scrambling when all my stuff arrives.

My first order of business was to take out the 3 small incandescent bulb light fixtures and replace them with fluorescent light bars.  Also, I figured out where I was going to place my workbench.  Below you can see the workbench location, and the new light bars at the top of the pic.

I then started in building the workbench . . .

. . . then my neighbors stopped by to let me know that I was doing it all wrong!  Luckily they straightened me out, remeasured a bunch of boards for me, and I was back on track!  (There Dad and my good friend Dave lent me his old Craftsman circular saw to use until I get my tools delivered to me with my household stuff.  Since I don’t have any of my own tools, I’ll use that saw and a cheap 12v I picked up at Home Depot to build the workbench and shelves before my stuff arrives . . . Thanks Dave!)

With the frame done I had to wait a couple of days because of the pesky rain (ahh, DC…) before I could cut the top shelf sections.

With a few hours reprieve from the rain, I was finally able to cut the top shelf and peg board and get this workbench in the bag.

Today I sent a check off to my engine builder, Tom Schwietz, at Aero Engines for a Superior Cold Air Induction Sump Kit.  I have been doing a ton of research on my cold air induction system over the past few weeks, and finally decided to go with Superior over the Sky Dynamics cold air induction system [Note: None of the pics below are of my particular set-up, but merely included as representative of the Superior cold air sump system].

Why Superior?  Cost and size.  Ok, there’s no doubt, in my mind at least, that Sky Dynamics’ cold air sump is the best cold air sump for a Lycoming that money can buy. This makes sense, since the Red Bull Air Racing team uses this system on their race planes.  But although the Sky Dynamics is the best that money can buy (again, my opinion), it takes a whole lot more money to acquire this system than it does the Superior cold air system.  The Superior system works well enough for what I need it to (more on that below) and is about $2000 cheaper, which of course is money that can be used to acquire other cool airplane stuff.  Also, even though Superior is about 3 lbs heavier than the Sky Dynamics, it is still about 6-7 lbs lighter than the original Lycoming vertical oil sump.

Now, why not ECi’s cold air induction?  ECi makes a great, lightweight magnesium cold air induction sump, but the two main issues with the ECi have to do with shape and configuration.  First, the shape of the oil sump is much like the original Lycoming cold air induction sump in that it has “wings” that stick out on both the right & left side of the oil sump.  These “wings” probably aren’t an issue in a normal downdraft cooled tractor airplane like an RV or Glastar, but for an updraft cooled pusher I want as much unimpeded airflow up through the cylinders as possible.  Unfortunately, ECi’s oil sump “wings” sit in the path of cylinder cooling airflow.  Next, the configuration of the cold air plenum sits farther forward on a tractor configuration than both the Sky Dynamics and Superior cold air sumps.  On a pusher canard, this of course means the cold air intake plenum, and thus the fuel injection servo, are situated farther aft… and in such a tight cowling as on the Long-EZ, space is a premium.  Especially when I’m going to have to do a near 180° U-turn on my intake ducting to bring air into the rear-facing fuel injection servo. So above are the primary reasons that I eliminated ECi from consideration.

As for the positioning of the fuel injection servo as it’s mounted to the cold air plenum, the Superior has the best (farthest forward in a pusher configuration) of the cold air induction systems I assessed.  As you can see in the pics below, on the Superior the fuel injection servo is pretty much mounted in line parallel with the aft edge of the oil sump, unlike either the ECi or Sky Dynamics sumps.  As I mentioned above, this provides more room in the aft end of the cowling for not only routing the intake air duct, but clearance between the fuel injection servo and both the alternator and starter.

Now the intake plenum on the Superior is significantly smaller than both the ECi and Sky Dynamics plenums, but still, the reviews on the Superior Cold Air Sump are pretty darn good.

One other distinguishing feature on the Superior sump is the robustness of the fuel injection servo mount.  The Sky Dynamics requires extra mounting brackets to secure the servo since the cantilevered weight of the servo would prove too much for the mounting interface.

Finally, after reading some discussions on the advantages of cold air induction–or lack thereof–from R. Mahlon and Rod Bower, I seriously considered giving up my goal on cold air induction and simply going with the standard Lycoming vertical oil sump.  The problem with a regular oil sump though is weight.  Going with a cold air induction sump actually saves a good amount of weight, if nothing else.  Moreover, the normally accepted value for increase in horsepower using cold air induction vs. a vertical oil sump is 5-7 HP.  If I can gain even half of that while saving weight, I’ll still be happy with the system.

Today I finally got around to marking something off my long-standing “To-do” list that includes all the nit-noy ancillary tasks that I need to accomplish.  So what was this mysterious task?

Well, in my haste to glass the top side of the Left wing, I forgot to pull the big piece of triangular peel ply off the bottom of the wing.  This peel ply covers the large triangular 1-ply BID layup that is glassed at the end of the wing as a foundation for multiple plies of glass that will attach to it to structurally hold on the winglet.

On the Right wing I had simply pulled the peel ply back off the leading edge a few inches. Since I forgot on the Left wing, the top skin glass overlapping onto the bottom skin is now actually overlapping onto the bottom skin peel ply.  Not exactly structural.  Luckily, since the peel ply is a triangular piece, only about 6-8 inches of the very end of the wing’s leading edge is affected.  Nothing that can’t be fixed.  I just had to mark it and then carefully Dremel away the ineffective overlapping top skin glass & underlying peel ply.

Once I removed the offending glass & peel ply, I continued on in my quest to give the wings a good once over with the sander.  The leading edge overlaps with the snarly, prickly glass especially needed sanding down so when we handled the wings nobody would get inadvertently punctured with wayward glass barbs.

Of course sanding fiberglass is never a joy.  It’s itchy, messy & not particularly good for the lungs.  Of course I was covered head to toe on what proved to be a fairly warm day in Germany.  So below is just a couple of pics of the ensuing personal carnage that sanding glass does to one’s own person!  Build on!

After I finished sanding the wings & winglets, I vacuumed up the insidiously ubiquitous glass dust that completely covered everything in the garage and got into absolutely everything.  Not surprisingly, sanding and vacuuming was my last official build effort for the next upcoming year!

But fear not, I will continue to post my progress on the build!