Well,
    It's been close to 3 weeks since I've done anything meaningful on the Velocity.. more a product of waiting for the right parts than anything else. The background is: had a 1992- flex plate, ordered a -1991 flex plate from an Ebay contact but did it off ebay, so took a week for the money to change hands by postal MO. The part gets here and it turns out its a 1992-later flex plate. WRONG PART! AUGHHH!!... I found another -1991 flex plate ON ebay with a pic.. and it clearly was the right one. Ordered it the 6th, it crossed the country by ground and got here Friday.... FINALLY.

I made it out to the hangar and had seen that Chris had made some significant progress on the control systems. He had mounted the torque tubes  to the ailerons, and mounted the bellcranks to them. He also had run the control cables/push rods and looked like he would be ready to connect them soon. Still have the rudders and elevators to link up and run cables. The cowling flanges/layups are essentially done and the cowl is soon going to be ready to be hung "for good".

The first action was to mount the flex plate to the rear counterweight. Couldn't find the blue loctite (it must have been put up for safe keeping by the hangar-mates).. so I put it on with the red. I don't intend to remove the flexplate from the counterweight in the forseable future anyways. Torqued it, and mounted the RD1-B damper to the flexplate. One of the metal ":bushings" (nested within the rubber donuts) was problematic/snug but eventually everything was mounted and tightened finger tight. Next I assembled the PSRU by the numbers, starting with the AN4/ (1/4") bolts through the adapter plate, then by placing the 10mm bolts in the opposing direction. Fitted the aluminum side pieces and brought the whole shebang over to the nearby engine/plane assembly. Everything fit on with the first try. A little bit of jiggling to get the gear assemblies to mate up.. but it all fit like it seemed it should.

I torqued the flex plate bolts, and then measured gear lash, which appeared minimal (the specified "half a degree") and uniform regardless of flex plate's rotation (no signs of binding). It was a little difficult to turn the engine by one hand on the rim of the flex plate, but thats always been the case (good compression?). I went ahead and removed/reinstalled the 10 mm bolts one at a time to loctite and torque them, and then rechecked the gear lash (no change). This was as far as I wanted to go with the PSRU tonight, so I marked the instruction book with my progress on the instructions, and moved to the next thing.

My next project was to replace the oil pan mounting hardware with premium grade hardware. I ran out the approx 20 M6x1x25mm bolts  and replaced them with new premium grade bolts that I had drilled the heads for a week or two ago. The row of bolts along the "rear" of the engine were not accessible due to the CCI mount geometry (crossbar) so I took this opportunity to remove the 4 shock mount bolts and hoisted the engine. It was at this point I did a not so safe thing. I worked momentarily under the engine/PSRU with it suspended solely by the hoist. Not recommended but I got away with it this time. I ran the last row of bolts in finger tight then gave a little hand torque with a stubby wrench.  Next the engine was moved to one of the new worktables I made last month, and I slowly set it down/rolled it on its side to expose the bottom/oil pan. I torqued all the pan bolts to 9 ft/lbs and then proceded to safety wire them. This is the largest run of safety wire I've done so far, and managed to get it all down in 4 interlocking runs. I re-hoisted the engine back upright, then propped it up on 2x4's on the CCI mounting plate ears. I finished off the morning by taking an airgun to the block and blowing off all the fiberglass dust from Chris's earlier work. I am SO glad I had the forethought long ago to plug every orfice on the engine.

I exercised the engine a bit by hand while doing the PSRU install, and inadverdently turned it backwards a few times.. in the process I discovered something.. some of the excess hylamar from the original install that squezzed out.. was being scraped ahead of the apex seals.. either this or maybe it was gummed up assembly lube (my stuff was blue).. but all the interior surfaces looked shiny, oil coated ( I had exercised it with WD-40 in the past month) and free of corrosion.

Next steps:
Waiting on Bruce's intake to go into production: WE WANT ONE...
Waiting on the PM alternator/waterpump combo: WE WANT ONE of those tooo...
A 4 pack of coils is enroute...as are a radiator overflow bottle and a rear washer bottle/pump (Oshkosk "aux cooling system")
Waiting on the EC-2... Should be produced/shipped soon by Tracy..
And other little details that I will defer mentioning at this point.

Pics to be listed on follow on posts..
Dave Staten
Velocity N17010
Mazda 13B Turbo 2nd gen rebuild