Friday, June 12, 2020

Wiring harness goes in

Several months ago I created a "to-do" list of tasks I have yet to complete before this thing flies.  I spent a significant portion of my Hawaii trip thinking and documenting this list.  I then put a guestimate of how many hours each item would take to complete.  Then I made an assumption on how many hours a day on average I work on the airplane.  The end result was a timeline that I could use to measure my progress.  Well, let me tell you that no matter how much time I spent trying to figure out what tasks were yet to be complete I missed a few.  On several tasks I grossly over estimated the time required, and on others I grossly underestimated.  This darn wiring hardness has been one of those that I grossly underestimated!  In spades!  I think I budgeted myself about a month to fabricate the harness and then a week to install it.  Yikes, I think I'm on week two of installation and I'm still not done!

Anyway, here is the current status in pictures.

Part of installing the wiring harness is making sure the wires are run to the correct location and in the correct length.  To do that I had to finish the installation of the center console.  While I was doing that I figured I might as well install the throttle quadrant so I know where wires can be run.  In this picture the center console has been cut to allow the quadrant arms to come through.

This is a view inside the center console looking at the location where the throttle quadrant will be mounted.

First picture of the harness as I start hanging it on the sub-panel.

A little further down the road as the instrument panel frame is installed and the VPX, backup buss, acc buss, and engine buss fuse panels are installed.  The ground wires are all plugged in, and the radio stack has all of the backing plates installed except the GNC255 which is still in the 9A.

Pilot side is much cleaner than the other side.  Not as many wires but several more plastic tubes for the pitot static system.

Instrument panel is installed long enough to make sure the wires are properly routed.

The switches I am using have a back-light feature that makes a panel light illumination unnecessary.  This bundle of wires is mostly related to that function but it also includes a few ground wire runs.

And what post would be complete without me showing some of the CNC work that goes along with this process.  In this picture you can see two placards.  The first one on the lower side of the picture is for the flap switch.  Only the engraving is complete on this one.  The CNC itself is working on cutting out the center hole for the start switch.  If you look closely you can see the "Engine Start" engraving that goes around the label.
This is the back side of the instrument panel.  Here you can see the switch wires and their proposed routing. 2/12/2021 EDIT:  If you are looking at the wiring config on these switches...don't.  I just found out that they were wired incorrectly.  If you use the Carling switches don't wire by the pin location...use the numbers for each pin.  The wiring diagram is deceiving because it shows the contact points being in one configuration when they are actually in another.  Use a volt meter to test the pins to make sure you have it right!