I decided to go with a Rotec TBI for the occasional inverted excursion. Getting to the point of hooking up my Van's FAB to the engine, and I see that the TBI is about half the size of the carb it replaces. This means the FAB ends up about 3 inches too high. So, I have to decide what to do about that. These are the ideas I came up with:
Option 1: bend the front of the FAB down to meet the air scoop. Probably the least amount of work, but would force the air to make two big bends.
Option 2: build a tube to extend the whole thing down a bit. Pretty much what was done here. This gives some extra expansion space, and will help straighten the flow into the TBI. I know that this area moves a lot, and worry about fatigue on a aluminum box, I am not an aircraft quality welder to make a steel one. I suppose if it was thick enough.
Option 3: rebuild the cowl to move the air scoop up. This would probably be the lightest, and the lowest drag. However it is also the most work, and almost all of it fiberglass. Yuck.
Pretty much any of these require some fiberglass work to bend the supplied air filter box, except maybe #2, if I drop it a little more than 3 inches. Mostly just thinking out loud here.
Working through these options has made me mostly lean #2, thought I would pass it by the group for comments.
Option 1: bend the front of the FAB down to meet the air scoop. Probably the least amount of work, but would force the air to make two big bends.
Option 2: build a tube to extend the whole thing down a bit. Pretty much what was done here. This gives some extra expansion space, and will help straighten the flow into the TBI. I know that this area moves a lot, and worry about fatigue on a aluminum box, I am not an aircraft quality welder to make a steel one. I suppose if it was thick enough.
Option 3: rebuild the cowl to move the air scoop up. This would probably be the lightest, and the lowest drag. However it is also the most work, and almost all of it fiberglass. Yuck.
Pretty much any of these require some fiberglass work to bend the supplied air filter box, except maybe #2, if I drop it a little more than 3 inches. Mostly just thinking out loud here.
Working through these options has made me mostly lean #2, thought I would pass it by the group for comments.