I need to get the exhaust finished up so I can plan out all of the other wire and hose runs for the engine (the exhaust takes up a lot of space, so everything else needs to be planned around it). I just made a wild guess and made 6 heat sinks to go inside the heat muff. There is room for more if down the road I find that I still don't have enough heat, but I imagine this will be plenty.
The heat muff doesn't leave many options for where to put it. It's about as long as the straight length of pipe it goes on, so regardless of how it sets relative to the engine mount, it's basically going to set where it's going to set. I'll have to snake the scat tube around the mount.
The weather cooperated today, so I primed and painted the panel and a few other random parts. I think my HVLP gun has seen better days. I got it on craigslist for cheap, and while it's a professional gun, the parts it was missing that I scrounged up pseudo fixes for are obviously not ideal. I will definitely be buying a different gun for the exterior paint. I think some of my issues with the Stewart Ekocrylic are because the gun can't set a decent fan. It has leaks around the tip, no matter what I do, and the widest fan that I can get without really messing up the paint atomization is about 4". That's compared to other HVLPs that can make fans 2-3x that size. Because of the little fan, it's very difficult to get consistent coverage - easy to go from not enough paint to completely flooding it on. The gun is fine for primer, but not so great with a finish paint.
It's yet to be seen how the panel turns out. Since I'm going to spray a matte clear coat over it all once the labels are on, it may not matter how the surface finish looks, as long as it's consistent.
