Matt's RV-7 Project

I asked Van's to email me a list of the IO-360-M1B firewall forward kit contents. For my own future reference, here it is along with my notes:

It's not warm enough in the garage to work on the canopy, so I moved it back into the house until summer. I'll work on the firewall-forward stuff instead.

My family was in town visiting this weekend. My little brother Adam looked over every inch of the RV-7 project, and Al was nice enough to give him a demo flight in his RV-6A. He doesn't look like he enjoyed it at all…

While they were out I snapped some photos of this F4F Wildcat that was parked in the hangar. This particular airplane has a very interesting history.

After lunch, Adam helped me get the fuselage turned around. To do this we had to roll it out onto the driveway, which generated some very surprised looks from the people in the car that happened to drive past just then.

This orientation will make it a lot easier to work on the canopy and firewall-forward stuff. Just for grins we put the canopy bubble on top of the fuselage. It's going to need a lot trimming to make it fit well.

While my dad was in town, we used his Jeep to fetch a 4×8' sheet of 3/4" plywood from the hardware store. This will be my temporary working-on-the-canopy bench, since the canopy bubble is way too big to fit on my real workbenches.

I also bought another space heater. Next weekend I'll see if I can get the temperature in the garage up to the magic 70° mark so I can do some canopy trimming. If not, I guess I'll have to postpone any further work on the canopy until summer. Stay tuned…

I ordered my engine from Mattituck today:

• TMX IO-360 with roller tappets
• ECI Titan cylinders with nickel carbide barrels
• 9:1 compression pistons
• Precision Airmotive Silverhawk fuel injection system
• Aluminum oil sump with forward facing induction
• Red Gold performance package (included with roller tappet option)
• One impulse-coupled Slick magneto
• One Lightspeed Plasma III electronic ignition
• Skytec high torque inline starter

Scheduled delivery is for the third week in January.