Engine plumbing, filled oil cooler, oil change | 1.10.2021

Cleaned the garage a bit, then set to work on plumbing the engine in some.

First, I installed the flexible lines that I had already made to the oil cooler lines on the back of the firewall. I then set about filling the oil cooler and lines with oil. This is so that on first engine start/pre-oiling, the engine doesn't have to pump this system completely full of oil while oil pressure sits there at 0 psi. I thought I'd just pour oil down one line and then gravity would feed it into the system until it was full. Boy was I wrong.

For some reason I couldn't get a good gravity feed into the system, even with a high funnel mount. After some thinking, I realized that I had a vacuum pump designed to pull oil out through the dipstick of a car (I use it for transmission fluid changes in my inboard boat). So I rigged up a plug to make a tight seal on the other oil line, and started pulling a vacuum on the other side of the oil cooler. Immediately, oil began flowing into the system *much* better.

Here's the system I had going. Funnel at top right, vac system to the left, both feeding into the hoses that go to the oil cooler.

I fed four quarts into the system, with some of it making its way back around into the vacuum system, but there were still some air bubbles coming out at the time, so I just kept pumping more through. All in all, I seem to have gotten about 2-2.5 quarts into the oil cooler system with the rest getting tossed as waste. I'm not sure what the total capacity is, but this will at least prevent the oil pump in the engine from having to pump this full before/on the first start.

Once full, I connected the oil cooler lines to the engine and called this done. Also observed no leaks on any of the connections.

Lines in orange fire sleeve connected to engine and oil cooler lines.

I then worked on assembling and plumbing the pressure transducer manifold. This is where all the engine pressure instruments will be mounted, with lines connecting them to their ports on the engine. These need to be remote mounted, otherwise the engine shakes them to death.

This pressure transducer manifold block purchased from Van's Aircraft. You could say between this and the prop governor cover I bought from them that this plane is basically a Van's, right?

Once that was done, I taped it up to the firewall temporarily because I ran out of firewall screws. Oops.

I don't seem to have grabbed any pictures, but I then fabricated the lines from the oil cooler pressure port and the manifold pressure port and ran them to the manifold block. The fuel pressure line I'm using from the DeltaHawk engine install kit, since it happened to have the correct size line and it's one of those high dollar Aeroquip manufactured hoses. It'd be a shame not to use it.

Lastly, I drained off the old oil and put in 8 quarts of fresh AeroShell W80.

That's it for now!
- Jeff