So I ended up having to take the whole system apart again. I made a slight mistake in that I mounted the blade slightly higher than before which made inserting the removal bolts much harder.
I also noticed that the grill works better with the radial ribs upward so it fits around the engine mount bolt heads better.
After disassembling I confirmed the impingement was between the collet bolts and the grill.
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| Top bolt with visible nicks from abraiding with the grill. |
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| The abraided fan grill. The ones at the inner ends are from this incident. The loss of paint at the 3 and 4 inch radius areas are from the original electric fan motor mount. |
When disassembling it I noticed that the nicked bolt was actually completely loose. Before going too far I will want to add some lock tight.
At the end of the timelapse you can see that I enlarged the clearance. However the bolt cutters left large sharp stubs that I felt were suboptimal.
So I stopped progress and went to the store to fix that.
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| The grill after using bolt cutters on it. |
You can see my grinding down and cutting off of the stubs, followed by filing them down with hand files.
I reassembled everything. I'm getting much faster at it now. With the larger interior hole it's much easier too. And I made sure to not mount it quite as high up the engine shaft for clearance for future dissassembly.
Once it was all reassembled I then tested the engine again. It ran smoothly and was drawing air in. I think we're on track for trying to hover tomorrow.
