Interior Delivery/Engine Control Cables

It's been steady progress since my last post. With the wings complete I've turned back to the engine and avionics. My seats and carpeting were delivered by Classic Aero Design. For simplicity and weight, I went with seats and carpeting only with no side panels. I can always elect to have side panels made in the future. My bride helped me pick the colors and we're both pleased with the results. Red is her favorite color and will figure prominently in the exterior color scheme. It's a nice contrast to the light gray cockpit paint. Looking forward to getting it all installed and sitting in it! I began the process of installing the five engine control cables: mixture, prop, throttle, alternate air door and exhaust door plus associated systems. The SteinAir provided throttle quadrant needed all the mounting holes upsized before install. This unit is about an inch shorter than the stock quadrant, looks great and will give me some much-needed knee room. The cinch nuts in the back for each cable are hard to reach because they're recessed. I took some cheap Harbor Freight crows feet in appropriate sizes and ground them down so I could fit them on the various nuts to tighten by hand. I started running all the cables to their various locations through the firewall. A couple cables needed their rods ends slightly adjusted to fit correctly so I rigged up a vise on a ladder to hold the cables while trimming them with a rotary tool. I used an Aircraft Specialty alternate air door that worked well. The door is for emergency use only to provide an alternate source of induction air should the primary induction air filter get iced or clogged over. Once opened you must remove the top cowling to reset it. The underneath exhaust door is unique to the EXP119 engine and acts as a pseudo cowl flap to manage engine cooling air in the center tunnel. This tunnel would normally contain the 4 into 1 exhaust on a standard IO-390. The EXP119 uses a Vetterman dual exhaust so the center tunnel real estate is empty. Vans apparently determined additional cooling management was needed with the different cowling the EXP-119 uses through flight testing. So that assembly and control cable was added underneath.