The gasket for the fuel controller arrived today, so I went ahead and installed the fuel controller and final torqued the nuts.
Following the engine maintenance manual, I torqued the nuts to 17 foot pounds (204. Inch pounds). The manual assumes there is no adapter, which there is, but this seems like the right value for the size studs that I’m installing onto.
With that done, I worked on the alternate air installation.
The alt air is a backup air intake for emergency use if the aim air intake were to become blocked (ice, bird strike, etc). There is a door on the side of the snorkel that can be opened with a control inside the cockpit. The standard Vans design doesn’t allow the alt air to be closed once it’s opened, so you’d have to take the cowl off to reset it if it were ever pulled. That’s ok, but it means you can’t test the mechanism as part of a run-up before takeoff.
Of course someone had solved this problem and come up with an alternative door design that can open and close using the cockpit control. The only difference is the door itself, it mounts onto the standard location without any modifications. This is what I’m going to install.
I needed to buy a hole saw because I didn’t have anything big enough. The plans called for a hole that is 2 11/16 inches in diameter. The closest diameter I could find at harbor freight was 2 5/8, and when I drilled the hole, it came out slightly over-sized, which was perfect.
Some of the instructions are a bit confusing, but carefully reading and following the steps made sense eventually.
The inlet is glued into position using epoxy.
