Not an engine just yet. Almost.

The first picture below shows one of the Aerovee conversion items.  It is one of the things that make it an airplane engine instead of a car engine.  Almost all single engine airplanes with internal combustion engines have two spark plugs per cylinder, usually each fired by an independent ignition system.  Most often it is two magnetos, each driving half of the plugs.

The first Aerovee conversions had two magnetos but each drove only two of the four plugs – only one plug per cylinder. So there was some redundancy. The engine would continue running, but roughly, if one magneto was lost.  The next addition was to add a second plug to each cylinder, and a redundant electronic ignition system.  Since the mags each only drove two plugs, they created dual electronic ignition where each also drives only two plugs. So there are four ignition sources for eight plugs between the four cylinders.  That’s redundant. If it wasn’t for the simplicity of how they trigger it all, I would say it was too complicated.

The last two pictures are first, the continuing oil cooler baffle assembly and second, the blocking off of the oil pump until it is time to hook up the oil cooler.  I won’t be able to actually mount the oil cooler until the engine is mounted in the plane so I don’t want dirt getting in.  The plugs are just hand tight.

More to come…