{"id":11814,"date":"2016-09-15T19:32:49","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T18:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=11814"},"modified":"2016-09-15T21:13:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T20:13:38","slug":"stuffs-happening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/stuffs-happening\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuff’s happening!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It turned out much cooler and fresher today but we still managed a high of 22 degrees Celsius. But the cloud didn’t clear and the sun didn’t come out until around lunch time, so I didn’t think that it would be worth heading over to Malbec and doing the couple of things I need to do on the X-Air. Instead I decided that while it was warm, I’d do a little bit of paintwork touching up that needed to be done on 28AAD, my French Weedhopper, before I could press on and install cabling and so on.<\/p>\n

So that’s what I did first off, but as it wasn’t warm enough to make the paint flash off today, I thought that while it was curing I’d continue with a couple more jobs in preparation for eventually fitting the engine – fitting the engine mounts properly and installing the fuel pump.<\/p>\n

Whoever had fitted the engine mounts on 28AAD knew that there was ‘something funny’ about how they had to be installed but evidently didn’t know what, and because they also didn’t know why, they had fitted them incorrectly.<\/p>\n

ULM\/microlight engines are mounted on Lord Mounts which consist of metal sleeves through which the engine mounting bolts pass that are encased in rubber to handle the engine’s vibration without cracking up. In turn, the rubber is mounted in a metal body that’s flanged to allow it to be bolted to the engine mounting plates that are attached to the aircraft fuselage.<\/p>\n

The flanges allow the Lord Mounts to be bolted above or below the mounting plates and this is for a reason, that being engine torque. When the engine is powered up, looking from the front, the propeller of a Rotax 503 or 582 engine rotates in a clockwise direction and this means that there is an equal but opposite force being applied to the engine that tries to rotate it anti-clockwise, in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n

This means that the Lord Mount flanges need to be mounted BELOW the engine mounting plate on the left hand side of the aircraft and ABOVE the plate on the right hand side so with the force that’s being exerted on them they bear onto the faces of the mounting plates. Simple really.<\/p>\n

But not for whoever last fitted 28AAD’s old engine, because they had fitted both rear Lord Mounts below the mounting plates and both front ones above. A big fail, then!<\/p>\n

So the first job was to choose the best set of Lord Mounts that I had and fit them properly using the best set of nuts and bolts chosen from my ‘old’ stock and what were already on 28AAD, actually a mixture of both, and here are a couple of shots of the final results. I’m missing a large flat iron washer (front right hand bolt) but that shouldn’t be difficult to replace.<\/p>\n

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There were already brackets on 28AAD that had been used to mount its original fuel pump, but they were non-standard and I still had MYRO’s old ones so used those instead. However, the rubber mounting bushes on 28AAD were almost brand new, so I used those and then installed MYRO’s old top fuel pump. Here’s how it looked.<\/p>\n

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So that was it for today. Things took a lot longer than it looks as though they should have, but it was work that had to be done and now the steps towards eventually fitting the engine have at last begun. I’ve done it all before but I still find it exciting \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It turned out much cooler and fresher today but we still managed a high of 22 degrees Celsius. But the cloud didn’t clear and the sun didn’t come out until around lunch time, so I didn’t think that it would be worth heading over to Malbec and doing the couple of things I need to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11814"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11831,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11814\/revisions\/11831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}