Engine Installation Started

I wanted to continue and finish the firewall wiring but the only remaining steps dealt with the adjustments of the the potentiometers of the Control Module. I didn't feel that now would be the best time to do this and so I decided to postpone this task to some time when the plane is at the hangar.
The next section was 46, dealing with the actual engine installation and this was the logical next step.

First, I had to get the engine on a work table as there was a lot of disassembly work scheduled that is best done at a convenient height. My shop crane had its debut as there was no one around who could have helped me lift this 160 lbs. engine onto the work table.

The inspection of the water hose elbow revealed that it needed to get turned by a 180 degrees.

It would have been helpful at this point if Van's had listed the torque for these allen bolts. It's 90 inch-lbs or 10 Nm, as listed in the Rotax Service Manual.

Then the electric connectors had to get removed.

Then I installed the two large bolts to be able to turn the crankshaft to check the gaps between the flywheel and the sensors. They turned out to be all ok. I only had feeler gauges from Germany in my cabinet, and the gap should be between 0.3-0.4 mm wide.

Next was the removal of the ignition module by removing the screw and the nut that held the dampers in place.

That's when the complete carb and wire harness setup was tipped forward and pulled over the gearbox to get access to the top of the engine. The last in the way was the cooling hoses, so they got removed too in the next step.

The access to the top of the engine is needed so the cooling shroud can get fitted to the shape of the engine.
But before that the scary part of cutting off the second ground lug of the starter had to get done. I used the angle grinder and a file to clean up the cut.

And finally it was time to trim the cooling shroud. This is the most time intensive part of this section so far. Good that I checked Dave's blog to see what he found out about the trimming process. This saved me a lot of time and grief. Dave said that after a lot of trimming and fitting he found that the scribe line would have been a good point to start with. So I decided to just do that instead - trim to the scribe line and then see if it fits.

In order to see the line better (it's on the inside of the shroud and trimming is easier by looking at the outside) I followed it with a black Sharpie which shines through the fiberglass.
Then the trimming started and once that was done, I had a pretty good fit with the engine. I finally removed anything beyond the scribe line (I was conservative at first and didn't trim all the way) and the fit was perfect.

I was dusted with fiberglass dust from head to toe after this and I really wanted to shower. I needed to do one more thing before calling it a day though. Painting the shroud!
First some enamel primer.

And then the final coats. All the paints are high temperature engine enamel. It doesn't suit any purpose but I think it looks great.

Oh, and when I got to the front door I saw that I hadn't heard the UPS guy dropping off the last part of my analog avionics. No wonder, as I was sanding with the pneumatic die grinder and wore my ear muffs.
However, here's that great piece of German workmanship:

This will last me a while, I assume, and now I don't worry about a failing ADAHRS anymore.