Firewall Forward

The firewall forward work has been going along at a reasonably steady pace in this stage.

I have been busy wiring up the engine bay and making the battery box and so forth. The battery box I had to install over on the Left hand side and essentially it was very close to the exhaust if I followed the plans. I have been trying to map things out to the best that my foresight will allow and hope that I don't encounter problems with lack of real estate as I go along. The battery box I made out of stainless steel as I had some left over. I think it matches well on the firewall and is stronger. I had also made a side hinge that will allow me to remove the battery as above the battery I installed the factory air/oil separator. This did take some serious head scratching to juggle it all in there neatly. 

Factory CHT sensors installed. They had been fantastic on my other engine so I just had to use these again. 

You can see the oil lines that have to be made for the turbo addition in these two pics. I had never worked with aluminium piping before and it was good. I think that I would like to change all the fuel lines now on my old plane to this type. It seems a more robust idea and this will also reduce the need to periodically replace them all which is a pain. Plus they look a heck more reliable. 

Coils and air/oil separator fitted. Coils in the usual spot and the master solenoid next to it. I also added a starter relay to the fray. I was going to just run it through the switch but it really was asking a lot of the poor old Narva ignition switch I used. The switch had a max current flow of 12 amps so was probably marginal so I added the 40 amp relay into the equation to make sure.

  I almost made a huge mistake with this cable. I made it, had it all fitted, and realized it went to the wrong battery terminal. that would have been a bad blue. I actually only really took this pic as it had MADE IN AUSTRALIA on the wiring :) at  least something I'm putting on the plane is Made in OZ.  If only but for a few wires.

A mate of mine gave me this mil spec plug and it turned out to be just the bee's knees.  It has 26 pins that can take a fair current. It was second hand so I had to cut off all the old wiring and add the tefzel wiring to it. This was a nice sit down easy job and has really neatened up the wiring significantly and it goes through the firewall with a good fire proof plug.

I still have a lot to do before the electrical side of things are complete. The instruments are still not here but should be only a day or so away. I expect this should be reasonably easy to finish up then. I have also added a narva 2 amp usb plug to the dash. We all know how much an in flight entertainment system is invaluable these days. hehe  IPAD..  so I don't get lost in this big country of ours :)