Hey all you Bat-men,

I just acquired a Flat Bat at a combat meet, and have a construction question. According to the instructions, the firewall has to be glued to the inside fat end of the bat, and then blind nuts used to fasten the motor mount to the front of the plane. This seems rather difficult to me. How does one attach blind nuts to the motor mount screws when they won't be able to see inside to thread the nuts onto the screws? The hole that one has to cut in the top of the bat is too far back from the end to allow for an easy installation.

Anybody figure out a creative way to do this??

Thanks!

-Dan

Mount the engine mount to the firewall directly (outside the plane) to seat the blind nuts. Take the mount off the firewall. In mine I didn't glue the firewall in. Use your mount as a guide to pre-drill the holes in the front of the bat. Now, take two long straight pushrods and stick them through two of holes in the front of the bat as guides, slip the firewall on to these through the radio access hole, tip the bat up and let the firewall slide to the front inside of the bat. Start screws in the other two holes. Remove the "guides" and install the other two screws. The cool part of not gluing it in is that you can now reuse the firewall over and over.

I did the original flat bat as described above, but I didn't use wood, screws and blind nuts. My firewall was made from POLY kitchen cutting board (wall mart) and the mount was secured with #6 x 3/4" self tapping screws into the cutting board.

Thanks, Tattoo! You made that sound soooo easy. Now, why couldn't I think of that?