Behind the Panel

There hasn't been much going on around here in general, and even less when it comes to the airplane. With the days getting ever shorter, I find that my hibernation genes are starting to secrete whatever it is that makes me tired by 3:00 pm and in bed by 8:30, with very little energy ready and willing to be expended in the brief interim between the two.

But....

There were three things that I wanted to do on the plane that would involve the removal of the avionics cover, a task that I used to think would be easy to do whenever the urge struck, but I am now learning is a royal pain.  I think it all comes down to a predefined progression of doing things that would look something like 'Remove these specific screws, position the canopy thusly, remove this other set of specific screws, etc.', if only I could remember it. Instead, we get this:

I (yet again!!) managed to get it in a state that necessitated the removal of the canopy, and this time also resulted in scratches in the new paint.  Argh!

Once inside, I noticed that the installation of the intercom was less robust than one might hope - it's not supposed to sag like that, one would think.

There. Fixed.

For now.

Job one was a more robust installation of the iFly GPS that I bought to act as a backup to the Skyview. Holes needed to be drilled and little itty-bitty nuts needed to be put in place with surgical precision:

It didn't take long at all, and I'm quite happy with the result.

Next was the installation of a single data wire that runs from the Skyview to the Garmin Comm radio. This wire wasn't included in my avionics kit, so I had to request it from Van's post-install. It required the removal of the radio tray which, if I'm honest, is a gigantic ouchy in the derriere.  It's so much more painful to retrofit than it would have been to install with the rest of the stuff that Van's sent it to me free-of-charge, presumably out of a well-earned sense of abject guilt.  Or they just forgot to charge me.

Whatever.

Once the tray is out, it's a simple matter of shoving the pin into the connector and adding another grounding terminal to the tiny little easy-to-lose screw in the bottom of the tray.

Viola!, as they say in the orchestra.

Van's included simple directions for telling the Skyview that there was a new member of the team to consider when calling audibles, but they were wrong.

Figuring that they might have simply been sitting in the wrong pew but in the right church, I checked neighboring menus and quickly found the right one.

Bada.

Bing.

As they say.  Now the Skyview can push frequencies into the Comm radio as I pick them out of the onboard airport database. It's a handy little feature!

The third thing I wanted to fix involved removing a big connector from the junction box and swapping a couple of pin locations. Pulling pins out of those connectors is one of my most hated things. The swap didn't fix the problem, so they had to be pulled out again and put back where they were in the first place.

The less said about that, the better.

It's all put back together now, so now I'm just back to waiting for a nice day to fly.