The exhaust tailpipes need to be supported with rigid, yet flexible, supports to allow the exhaust to move a little with engine vibration (especially on startup) without moving out of position enough to hit the cowl. This is accomplished by clamping steel tubing to the exhaust and engine/mount and using high pressure rubber hose to tie the two pieces together. The space in between the two steel tubes is only about 1/4", and the rubber hose spans that space and allows just a slight amount of movement.
The steel tubing that came with the exhaust kit wasn't long enough for my liking, so I got some of the same stainless steel on Amazon and made my own to the size I wanted. The tubing is scuffed up, and a slight flare is made on the end to help keep the rubber hose from sliding around too much.
The vertical support goes from the tailpipe up to a bolt on the engine sump. The horizontal support is a little different than what the plans show. The plans show that you can tie the left and right exhaust to each other in the horizontal plane, but the new nose gear design with the elastomer doesn't have any space to allow a support to go from one tailpipe to the other. I verified with other builders that the only real option is to go the opposite direction and tie the tailpipe to the engine mount. That's not ideal because you're attaching a moving engine piece to a mount that doesn't move, but people say it actually works just fine. These simple connections took hours to do between the two sides - those tailpipe clamps were far from easy to work with! The setup is nice and rigid, but with a small amount of wiggle room.
The tailpipes take up lots of space and had to be permanently mounted before I could move on to other things. With those done, I could put the scat tubing in place for the cabin heat box. The other scat tube going to the inlet of the heat muff will go in a little later since it connects to the rear baffle that's not in place yet.
I switched gears a bit to see if I could salvage the paint job on my panel. I wet sanded it and then used polish to try to flatten out the extremely uneven surface I had. I didn't sand it completely flat in all places, mostly because I was afraid of cutting through the paint. So it's far from perfect, but it's 1000x better than it was. I definitely see the value of wet sanding! It's kind of the secret tool of painting, like a grinder is to a welder. I didn't polish the surface to a mirror finish because my plan is to spray a matte clear coat over it once the labels are on anyway. The matte clear will also help hide some of the imperfections in the finish. The gloss finish is what makes every little detail stand out.
I couldn't help but move right on to applying labels! I had laid out all of my labels in a vector program and sent them off to be printed as dry rub transfers. The benefit of spending the time getting all of the measurements correct in a vector program was that they could be printed in exact, true sizes. That meant I could apply whole blocks of labels at one time vs having to do one word at a time and fight with getting them all straight. The distortion in the photos make it look like some are crooked, but they're pretty straight for the most part. Of course, I have to leave some imperfections so there's no doubt that I did the work myself vs farming it out!
The panel color isn't quite as dark as the photo makes it look, and the matte clear will lighten it up a little as well. I'll spray the clear coat on tomorrow, then once that is dry I can get the panel back in the plane and start putting all of the instruments in!
