Big ears and thumb slice

With the top bracket complete I just needed to weld in the lower ears before finalising the bracket design. The snow and cold wasn't making spending a few hours in the workshop particularly appealing, but wrapped up and the blow heater being left on for an hour or so meant it was actually not too bad, although the cold must have clouded my judgement as i ended up grinding my thumb rather than the plastic coating!

Its amazing how quickly a thin cutting disk slice into a finger!!! Getting dressed. texting, writing plus numerous other things are a little uncomfortable at the moment to say the least!

After wrapping it in rag and electrical tape i returned to grinding and finished removing all of the coating around the welding areas. With the engine and MDF brackets back in place i clamped up the mounting ears in place and tacked welded them in position. 

While everything was in place i made some final marks on the MDF brackets were i required small modifications in readiness to transfer them into CAD for the waterjet cutting company.

 With the engine out again i welded up the brackets.

To transfer the rough MDF brackets into CAD, i traced the shape of the brackets onto 1mm squared graph paper and used the grid to create reference points in AutoCAD. After getting a rough shape i  squared everything up and smoothed all the curves and radii  to get a nice neat shape. It had been a while since i had used AutoCAD in any real anger so took me a while to remember how to do a few things, but after a couple of hours i had a set i nicely curved brackets. The 2 smaller brackets are the prop/reverse mounting bracket and starter motor spacer.