After some domestic duties and running around getting errands done, today was more of a planning, assessing and design work day than it was an actual knock-tasks-out day.  It was also a spend another 30 minutes looking in all the usual suspect places for my bag of wire terminals.  Frustrating, but I found ’em.

In the background I’ve also been working on both designing and identifying parts & materials that I’ll need for the latches on the strake storage hatches.  Yes, I decided to go a little fancy on those as well with a lightweight cable latch handle situated in the ~2″ hole on the outboard bottom end of the CS spar (AKA strake) that when pulled will release the spring hinged storage hatch door on the topside of strake… very close in operation to my top cowling oil dipstick door.  Moreover, I’ve been doing some initial modeling in CAD with dimensions I took off those bottom strake access holes.

Out in the shop I spent WAY too long (nearly 45 minutes) mounting an Adel clamp around the fuel hose where it exits the engine mount.  It was a bear to get that screw in there given the limited access to those clamps, but in the end I got it done.  I’ll note that I wanted this Adel clamp at this spot on the fuel hose for 2 serious reasons:
1.  The steel 90° hose end fitting is cantilevered straight out horizontally from the fuel pump fitting, so I wanted to ensure I support the hose and not have the fitting under stress and/or slowly lose its grip over time.
2.  The Cozy Girrrls, God bless ’em, welded a reinforcement plate in the corner of the engine mount they sold me.  Well, I had literally no other way to route my fuel hose off of the fuel pump other than right where it is.  This meant removing a chunk of that reinforcement plate.  Which further means there is essentially a dull knife blade mere fractions of an inch away from my main fuel feed out of the fuel pump to the fuel injection servo.  In case scenario #1 above were to ever happen, I didn’t want the vibrating engine mount gnawing a hole in the fuel line if it lowered in position over time.  The Adel clamp is positioned as a literal physical barrier between the fuel hose and this engine mount plate edge.

In short, this just-installed Adel clamp was both an essential and critical requirement for safe operations of this engine, IMO.

After playing “find me if you can” with my wire terminals, I then spent nearly 3 hours looking at the last 3 major cable/wire runs coming off/out the lower right firewall corner.  Again, this is the big yellow starter cable, the white 8-ga alternator B-lead, and the smaller white alternator field wire.  In addition, I verified and updated my wiring diagrams to include wire labels.

My initial plan was to run these cables just above the cold air intake tubes, and hanging off a couple of the oil sump perimeter bolts in Adel clamps, somewhat as I did with the EGT & CHT wires.  However, again that pesky fuel hose is right in the way of the big yellow starter cable.

I played around with different variants of my initial configuration for quite a bit before trying a completely different southerly route with the cables hanging off outboard side of the throttle cable lever bracket.  The one slight concern I have is the cable being in the general vicinity of the fuel injection throttle lever rotating back and forth.  The gap is more than sufficient for clearance, especially once the cables are secured, it’s just the pucker factor of anything getting close to that throttle lever.

To ensure the “southerly route” was viable, I mounted the lower cowling and spent a good 15 minutes trying to peak into any crack or crevice I could find to verify clearance between the cables in this configuration and the bottom cowling.  At every point I could see it all looked good and I’m counting this routing as a very acceptable option.

As I was walking back to the house, having closed up the shop, it hit me that maybe I could move the firewall exit point for the big yellow starter cable up an inch or two to provide more clearance between big yellow starter cable and the main fuel hose in going a more VFR direct routing betwixt firewall and starter lug, via Adels off the oil sump.  I’ll take a look at that tomorrow.

Regardless, enough banalities for the evening.  It’s getting way too late.

Pressing onward!