It took a bit getting back into the swing of things after our mini-vaca down to Florida.  Plus, a bunch more rain had poured down and, once again, a good bit of the shop was flooded…

Just at the point where I need to do some welding with the lower left bracket mounted back on the engine, only sans pipes.

So after working and dialing in the configuration of the lower left bracket pieces, I then left the bracket overnight to do the final welds the next day since the area immediately under the engine was flooded.  I did do a good bit of mopping, but I needed to let it dry out overnight.  I also spent a good bit dealing with a half-downed ceiling insulation panel: a gift from the squirrels as that war wages on.

Today I did some practice welds before tackling the pair of tack welds to recombine the lower left exhaust pipe bracket pieces.  Yep, it’s not currently looking like a beauty queen, but I think after we weld ‘er up and clean ‘er up it’ll turn out pretty darn ok.

I then spent a good hour drilling out the upper mounting screw/bolt holes in the aft baffle wall and underlying reinforcement plates.  I then mounted a K1000-3 platenut in each upper corner to secure the upper left exhaust pipe bracket, as you can see from the outboard side (pic 1) and from the inboard side (pic 2).

With the mounting screws in place, I then did a number of rounds of final trimming on the pipe sleeves before locking them as tightly as possible to the exhaust pipes with clamps (pic 1) and before hot-gluing the upper bracket plate to the upper pipe sleeves.

After the hot glue set up, I removed the upper left exhaust pipe bracket and took it over to my welding table.

I then tack welded the upper left exhaust pipe bracket with no major issues (a minor issue is that on my last weld the hot glue ignited and there was a fairly decent fire blazing over one side of the bracket!).

I spent a good half hour scraping nearly all the hot glue off the bracket before remounting it into place to check its configuration.  The bracket fits really well and, overall, I’m happy with how all the brackets fit —both left and right sides.

Here’s one more shot of the tack-welded upper left exhaust pipe bracket, from the inboard side looking out.

Tomorrow I’ll clean up all the brackets, then clean up (grind) the tack welds and get these suckers ready to take down to James at some point in the near future to have him work his TIG welding kung-fu magic.

Pressing forward!