Housekeeping

From the mail bag:

I ran into Ken Scott at our EAA Bldg the other day, and he assured me
that the wiring is the same between the 180 and the sky view. In fact
the wiring harness as now installed has two extra wires in it that are
for the sky view. Van's is now telling people waiting on sky view that
they can jump ahead and install the motor.
Also, I wouldn't install the back window until you have the servos in.

Now, having been trained in the art of Clintonian Language Parsing, I could note that there was no mention of the static tube, but if the static tube was to move locations to attach to an AHRS box somewhere other than in the avionics area, the wiring would certainly be affected as well since there would have to be another wire run from the box's location to the back of the Skyview. Or perhaps there will still be such a wire - that wouldn't change the existing wiring, just add more to it.

I choose to believe, however, that Mr. Scott meant what he said and that's it's safe to press on with the wiring as it is today. That means that I have to do the last couple of pages of section 31. They're primarily clean-up jobs.

The first was to add a 9 pin connector to the ends of the OAT wires and four other wires that had made the long trek down from the avionics area. This connector will plug into a box that works with the Dynon D-180, or would have, anyway. Now it will hopefully plug into a similarly located box that plugs into the Skyview.

Very soon in the next section, I'm going to be installing the flap handle. It comes out of the box as an unpainted steel tube, so I went ahead and painted it. I left it on the floor to see how long it would take me to step on it and mess up the paint.

Twelve minutes, if you're keeping score at home.

The 9 pin connector needed to be routed up to the top of the tail cone. That meant cutting off all of the wire ties that I had used to hold the static line in place last winter when I was working on the tail. It was a somewhat unpleasant working environment.

The second to last thing was the installation of the "wire way," which is effectively a bridge to carry the wires over the rudder pedals. Looks easy, doesn't it? And it would have been, if it had been installed as part of the fuselage kit. It's beyond my understanding as to why they had us wait until now.

As with real estate, the problem is location, location, location. It was no mean feat to get that little tray up there in the area over the rudder pedals. In fact, I ended up having to pull the rudder pedals out. Again. This is why most people don't install the rudder pedals until they're done with all of this stuff. I leave them installed because I'm afraid I'll lose them if they aren't attached to something.

It took a couple of hours all told to get the wire way in, mostly because I waited too long to realize that I had no choice but to remove the pedals. What finally convinced me was something I noticed when I took a break: I'd been pushing and shoving on stuff inside the fuselage so much that it had pivoted on the sawhorse and very nearly come completely off the desk that holds the tail up.

The last step was to install the caps on the little nylon holder-downy thingys that the fuel lines, brake lines, and wires nestle down into. The bottoms were installed during the building of the fuselage kit, and the tops were set aside somewhere where I wouldn't lose them.

I've hunted high and low for them to no avail. I'll try again tomorrow.