A short weekend due to work commitments, so I only had a couple of hours to devote to building. I had received the replacement inlet ramp and bracket from Van’s, as well as a couple more firewall pass-through assemblies from Aircraft Spruce, so I figured that I would at least get organized for the next couple of weeks. One of the things I wanted to do was to finish up the manifold pressure line, so that is where I focused my attention.
The plans call for using the #3 cylinder for manifold pressure, and while that is fine, the challenge for me is that the kit supplied by Van’s is for an analog gauge—and the sensor supplied by Garmin for the G3X is for an electronic. The analog version requires another firewall pass-through and since I really didn’t want to do that, I decided to use the spare port in the manifold currently housing the oil and fuel pressure fittings. This meant a wholesale shuffle of hoses as the closest cylinder to the manifold was the #4 cylinder…and the only hose long enough to reach that (barely) was the oil pressure hose. I figured that if I swapped the oil pressure and manifold pressure hoses, I could make everything work.
The biggest problem I encountered was trying to move all of the fittings to their new locations. In the process, I found one of the brass plugs was stuck (not sure why but possibly because I had tightened it down a bit too much). A side trip to procure a bolt extractor and I finally got it out. Then it was just the fitting shuffle and reattach to the firewall.
