After noticing that the cowl would not line up the same every time it was installed, I decided to patch the holes in it. Lots of openings from previous systems allowing the cowl to flex.
After reviewing the oil cooler installation, I decided to rework it again. The angle of the cooler made for a terribly inefficient system. There is just no more space to work with and will give me the opportunity to fix the sharp curve at the firewall.
The oil cooler was a 13 row Mocal cooler that was 13" wide and 4" tall. I decided to go with a Positech cooler that had about the same fin area but was only 8" wide.
I mocked the new shape up in Photoshop using a 10 row cooler but it was still too wide. The green line is the shape of the bottom of the cheek. I dropped it a bit to allow the hot air exiting the heads a more direct path to the cooling outlet. The red line would have been the overall shape of the lower cowl and the blue would have been the new outlet duct.
I was still not happy with how it was going to work out and went with a Positech cooler for an O-300. Its only 8" wide and will not force the bottom of the cowl to be quite as low. Being on the road, I used an iPad app called Touchdraw to mock it up. Its one of the better CAD apps and allows photo imports. It supports layers and opacity settings that allow for the creation of ghost images.
Now if I could only get home to actually do the work!
No comments:
Post a Comment