Cleaning up the rats nest

I spent a few hours working through the punch list. One of the first things I wanted to do was clean up the wiring. The stuff in the avionics bay wasn't bad, but could be better. The stuff in the tunnel was a nightmare. I got off to a slow start, though, when I couldn't find the step stool needed to get in and out of the plane when the wings aren't on. It didn't take long to find, but it did remind me that the actual steps were not yet installed. I took care of that, and will surely regret it as I begin the long, painful process of learning not to bark my shins with them.

I disconnected roughly half of the J-box connectors and re-routed some of them. There were still a couple of bundles that were in need of some tie wraps to keep them nicely collected. I gave myself a bit of a scare, though. I though it would be a good idea to turn the Skyview on when I was done to make sure that I hadn't broken anything.

 TRANSPONDER FAIL! Uh-oh!

I removed the transponder connector to make sure none of the pins had been bent. It looked fine. I tried re-seating it half a dozen times to no avail. Finally an inspiration struck me: how about trying it with the Avionics switch turned on? That did the trick. So, mental note: the transponder only works when the Avionics switch is turned on. Imagine that!

The tunnel was a much bigger job, due both to the extent of the mess and the awkwardly inconvenient work location. Just getting the various wires untangled enough to allow them to be bundled and restrained was a herculean task. It looks a lot better now, but at the end of the day I probably made it look better at the cost of having introduced a plethora of sources of the type of spurious electronic interference that will drive me nuts for the next five years.

I had hoped to get the throttle and choke controls installed, but by the time I got that *&^@#$ heater cable put back in I had had enough. I did manage to get the cables pushed through the panel and firewall, but the business ends of them are just dangling out over the engine.