The wiring harness is slowly coming together. All of the wires that will be installed outside of the airplane are in, all connectors that do not have to be run through a bulkhead are installed, and its about ready to be installed.
Some lessons learned for the next time I have to do this.
- Use 22 awg wire for all shielded applications. 24 awg is a bit small and seems to make fragile connectors and anything larger than 20 awg is just too big for the HD pins.
- When installing shrink wrap labels make sure they are far enough up the wire that they wont need to be cut to install shield drains. This is particularly important for wires with the "window" type shield drain like the CAN bus splices.
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| More wires laid down. At this point I was thinking I was mostly done....and then the work started. |
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| My flying friend Ben stopped by and took this picture of me working on the connectors. I started from the bottom of the picture and was working my way up. The GMA (Audio Panel) connectors were next on the list and by far the most time consuming. Those connectors had many many wires and almost all of them were shielded wires that had to be grounded to the back-shell of each connector. |
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| Finally all of the avionics connectors are installed and all that is left is the ground wire terminals and the VPX connectors. |
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I drilled and mounted the center console and that allowed me to finally locate the fuel valve extension handle.
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| Panel, lower center panel, and the center console installed. Also in this picture you can see the avionics rack and all but the GNC255 radio tray installed. |
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| Panel inserts are placed in the frame for test fitting. I think this is going to work well! |
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| Front view of panel with inserts. Its a little easier to see the engraving in this picture. |
