I spent several days installing the Constant Speed Propeller Governor. On the XIO-360 M1B Engine, the propellor governor is mounted to the engine accessory mounting pad. I didn’t anticipate this location because the certified production model of this engine has the control mounted on the top housing of the engine block. Additionally, the installation instructions were for a generic Propeller Governor which was considerably different than what I purchased years ago. There was nothing online to help and the original company that built the control unit was sold 3X since this unit was manufactured. Needless to say, I had to do multiple modifications and to top things off, the cable control firewall-through location was not correct as per VAN’s plans. The housing for the cable control has an external spring I didn’t notice and when I disassembled the unit to align the housing with the control cable and associated bracket, the spring unloaded and ricocheted off my face and landed about 30 feet away. I’m very fortunate I had my safety glasses on. The problem I now had was there were no instructions or pictures of how this odd-shaped spring was installed whether the control arm was supposed to be held open or shut. After lots of trial and error and removing the oil filter assembly; I got it figured out; re-safety wired all the housing, stops, and control screws to successfully install the unit. The worst part was installing the mounting bolts. It took a total of 16 hours to get one bolt in and torqued. I seriously considered removing the engine several times during this very frustrating process.
