Today my friend Simon came over and we hung the engine on the airplane! It was a big day, and it all went according to plan.
I borrowed an engine hoist from my neighbor, and it worked out well. The engine was still encased in its foam shipping crate, and was sitting on a 4×8 foot dolly I had built with wheels. That allowed us to roll everything around and position things easily. Before we started, I printed and studied the document here which is very helpful. I copied the Vans diagram from the plans and taped it to the side of the plane. I arranged the hardware in a cardboard box to ensure we had the right bolts, washers, and orientation on the rubber mounts for each bolt.
I also leveled the plane by raising the tail and resting on a saw-horse. To make sure we didn’t have a balance issue, I slung 40 pounds of weight below the saw-horse, and strapped the plane down onto the horse. Then I chocked the main wheels to keep it all steady.
We started by lifting the engine clear of the packaging, then carefully rolling the engine into position. A little adjustment in height and some side-to-side movement and we had it in the right spot. Following the instructions, we started with the top right bolt, which was fairly easy. The second bolt was the top left, and also fairly easy, as the engine could still be moved around a little. The third bolt was bottom right, and took some more manipulation than the others. The final bolt took the most effort. We tried all options of changing the torque on other bolts, and lifting and lowering the engine, to arrive at the optimal alignment. We were able to get it started into the hole by hand, but had to screw it into the hole to get all the way through. It didn’t take much torque, perhaps a couple of foot pounds at most.
Once all four bolts were in, we torqued up all of the bolts to 40 inch pounds, then disconnected the hoist. I need to check my math on the torque values to get it right, but the hard part is done! It feels like a huge step forward to have the engine on, and that much closer to being a real airplane.
Update, after doing some research, I’m going to torque the bolts to 42 foot pounds. This allows for a couple foot-pounds of torque drag (I measured between 1 and 4 foot-pounds when rotating the bolts), and still being in the target 37.5 to 41.7 range.
