To address Finn's concern, Rusty sent me the original Lycoming mount for the mount points, Adding the "fix" while seeming to take care of the failures, Van had already designed a better way with the RV-6,7,&9 mounts. Rusty's mount is just a smaller version of this design. It addresses all the issues with the original mount with the addition of another mount point, two diagonal braces, and two shorter tubes welded to the gear sockets to solve the tortional socket twist problems. The gear leg geometry is much more robust than stock mount. Fred

At 01:24 AM 3/10/2004, you wrote:

Russell Duffy wrote:

This is an RV-3B?
What happend the the triangular pieces running from bottom of spar, between rudder pedals, up to engine mount bolts 5 and 6?  I can't beleive they were removed in the RV-3B. These two additional engine mount bolts and stiffeners were added to the RV-3 after several engine mount failures.

 Hi Finn,
 

 
The mount that I have was not made from the original Lycoming mount, but rather designed from the ground up by Fred.  It has a 5th mounting point, and should not have the same problem that the original Lycoming mounts had. 
 
Good eye BTW :-)
 
Rusty

I'm still concerned. It's not so much an engine mount issue as a landling gear leg issue.Top of gear leg tubes each got added the additional attach points to the firewall and from there stiffeners all the way back to the main spar. I guess I should have paid more attention to the firewall forward pitures. The RV-4 has them too. Gear shimmy or hard landings could break loose the top of the gear leg tubes.

Finn