Water cooling

Now this is where it actually got really hard and I invested so much time on failed theories and I think at the end I was up to about plan E for getting this thing to fit and work. Honestly it took ages and I still don't even know it it will cool properly or even at all. I didn't realize until I really looked at the radiator that it actually had 3 of the 4 mounting pins broken off from the accident in the old plane. This bummed me somewhat again as now I've had to buy a cooler and radiator and suddenly the reasonable deal I got for the complete fire wall forward engine package was getting more and more expensive.   Still what do you do?    I was this far along the road I couldn't just stop now. So I bought this aluminum one. I found out later when I looked it has 1 x less core than the original one. I hope it will cool just as well however.

Mounted in the general area. It's still basically in that spot now with some better attach brackets.

Side view

I had originally planned to have the ducting attached to the cowling and mate these two surfaces up. I quickly found out however I could not accurately mate the two surfaces together with the vertical split cowling.  The aim was not to modify the cowling much so I have gone now for the fully fitted and removable ducting. It was much easier this way and I hope it works. The surround didn't go to waste anyway as I incorporated it into the duct.

 Making the plug for the duct was very time consuming again and it literally took me days and days to get it all to fit.

I started with just making one side of the duct to flow around the engine then I would add onto it  or trim to suit the fitment of the cowling. In the end it didn't need much of either so I glassed the other side in.

Taking shape on the engine and glassing it on both sides

The test to see if I had a uniform air pattern on the other side of the radiator. I attached a piece of string to a wire and placed it on the back side of the radiator in different spots while using the leaf blower to see how the air came out. The leaf blower basically could blow about the same as 90 kts forward air speed... At about half throttle it was the same of about 60 kts airspeed.

The duct is a bit of an ugly duckling but at least it will be well hidden inside the cowl and not seen... I have learnt a massive amount about fiberglass in these last few months and I'm sure if I was to ever do it again it would turn out much better.