I spent the first part of today catching up on my blog posts.  I basically cut and pasted the early ones off my MacBook which is having issues and am now working off a Windows laptop.

I then spent a good hour torqueing the lower engine bolts to specs.  If you look closely you’ll see the AN970 wide area washer shim that I added on the bottom mounts to get the engine angle closer to where it should be 1-2°.   I’ll remind you that this was done in consultation with the folks at Lord engine mounts, not just willy-nilly.

I have castellated nuts with cotter pins on the 2 top engine mounts, and I did the same for the lower left engine mount… but what a ginormous PITA!

Here’s a wider shot of the torqued-to-spec-after-adding-shim lower left engine mount.

As far as a castellated nut with cotter pin on the lower right engine mount? … uh, no way!  I called no joy on this bubba right out of the gate since there is about zero clearance to get any of MY tools in there to get a cotter pin installed.  I simply went with the original AN363-720 nut called out in the Long-EZ IIL plans.

I then had a good conversation with Clinton at Custom Aircraft Parts.  He asked me to send him some pics of the left exhaust pipes to coordinate possibly sending them back to him to have the outboard rebent and the inboard pipe cut and rewelded to get them angled up at the aft end and off the bottom cowling.

Here are a few of the pics that I sent to Clinton.

With the exhaust pipes being so close to the cowling (Dave Anderson’s are as well with his Melvill cowlings so he applied heat shields to the inside surfaces of his cowling) Clinton highly recommended getting them ceramic coated to reduce the emissive heat impact on the cowling surfaces.  At this point I’m very much leaning towards BOTH ceramic coating and heat shields… and of course will be doing much more research and fact finding on those.