The reinforcement piece is pre-drilled and just needs to be match drilled to the baffle floor (on the bottom).
The right floor receives a reinforcement piece on the bottom side:
The reinforcement piece is pre-drilled and just needs to be match drilled
to the baffle floor (on the bottom).
The kit comes with a couple of lengths of 3/4 x 3/4 aluminum angle. The
top of the right floor gets a length of this angle, match drilled to the
reinforcement piece on the bottom:
On top of the angle piece goes a heat raiser to block the front of the cylinder
head and re-direct the incoming air up into the top of the engine area:
Again, this is all match drilled to the reinforcement piece on the bottom
side of the floor.
A quick note about the heat raiser (Van's calls it a "raiser", I might have called it a "riser"). Through experience, they have found that these raisers are sometimes needed to redirect the cooling air to the back cylinders because the front cylinders will run cooler than the rear cylinders. Van's recommends that you test fly it first without the raisers, and then add them if needed. During flight testing, if you find the front cylinders running quite a bit cooler than the rear ones, you can add these raisers to bring the temps of the front cylinders up a bit and cool the rear ones down. I went ahead and match drilled them to the floors in case I need them later but will leave them off when I rivet the parts together. After test flying, I can always go back and drill out the rivets and add the raisers if needed.
Here is the right front floor clecoed in place:
See that little black mark on the flywheel? That is the where I marked
where the bottom of the air inlet on the nose bowl is. The baffle floor
must be bent down low enough to be just below that mark. The floor
piece should be final shaped before installing the part that wraps around
behind the flywheel and the bracket that attaches it to the side baffle.
The front cylinders also have a place for the little threaded rod and AN3 bolt as shown for the rear cylinders.
I had to trim a little bit to clear the flywheel as shown by the arrow
below:
Now for the left side floor. There are two braces for the left side
of the engine and again we have the slot for the threaded rod and AN3 bolt
(right side of picture):
I'm glad this area is well supported as I plan to put the oil cooler under
this floor as on Proto 1.
The floor on the left side doesn't have the reinforcement piece on the bottom
side but does have a full length piece of 3/4 x 3/4 angle plus another heat
raiser to block the front of cylinder head #1 (if needed):
Click here to go to Engine Baffles page 6