Lift engine mounted!

The lift engine has been mounted!

The mounted lift engine

It's far from optimal. In particular if I need to do maintenance it will be a big pain as getting inside the housing requires a full disassembly. However it's there and I feel pretty safe with it in place.

I'd also like to decrease the occlusion of the intake. We'll leave that to a 2nd generation however.




One of my worries is about the collet. I hope that it will release when the time comes. The supplied release bolts are black annodized 1/4-20 about 1" long. I removed them as they were just going to be a risk of rattling free.

Fan mount prior to tightening.

The bottom side of the fan with washers added for good measure.

 

 

 

5/16"x3" bolt without washer

 Bolting the engine down went fine except that the 5/16ths washer couldn't fit onto the longer engine mount on the backside so I skipped that. But I did find nyloc nuts for better security.

The other two engine bolts before tightening

The engine in position waiting to be bolted down

Thanks to help from Jenny, getting the engine into place was not too hard. I blocked it up briefly while aligning the protection fan, then clamped it down before drilling the clearance holes manually.

I was able to confirm clearance by spinning the fan using the pull start of the engine.

Before powering up, I need to remember to reinforce the cockpit frame with plywood to avoid parallelagramming. A few pieces of left over plywood will take care of that nicely.

Lift Engine Mount Plate

I've made some more progress toward an engine mount thanks to help from Michael.




In our testing of the stackup you can see it seems to work well enough.

Test stackup of the lift propeller with the lift engine mount

The single board was not wide enough, so we glued two together. The bolts would hold it together, however it is better to hold together independently.

Glueing together the boards with clamps. (First clamp revmovced)

The final mount

A fit check