Oil Cooler, Oil Lines, and Some Riveting

TLDR

• Fitted the oil lines but not torqued

Details

Worked on test fitting all oil lines on the engine, but haven’t torqued any yet.

Fitting on Oil Cooler

The oil coolers has 2 straight fitting that needs to convert to AN8 fitting. The adapter is too big for my regular wrenches, so I went to Harbor Frieght to get a set of new deep sockets and torqued the 2 adapters to 25 NM with loctite 577 and an o-ring.

Oil Line to Engine

There a a total of 5 hoses to connect for the oil system:

• Engine left to oil tank
• Engine right to oil tank
• Oil tank to oil cooler
• Oil cooler to oil pump
• Oil pump to oil tank

All hoses need to be routed carefully to avoid touching the super hot exhaust system. The PTEF lines I bought from Aerospace Innovations came with heat sleeve pre-installed so that’s one less thing I need to worry about.

However, the fitting for the oil line on the right side of the engine is very difficult to connect. It just doesn’t have the clearance to wiggle the fitting to get the connection started.

I had my camera recording, and turns out I spent close to 2 hours on this single fitting trying different routings and angles.

Finally, I had a brainwave and made a few changes to get the connection started.

• I temporarily removed the adel clamp holding some pipes right in front of the fitting on the engine.
• I rolled up the heat sleve from the PTFE hose to expose the aluminium braiding.

With these 2 changes, I got maybe 5 mm additional clearance when wiggling the connectors. And the additionally clearance was the key.

After the fittings were connected, I rolled the heat sleeve back.