Today I made some more progress on baffling, deburring, dimpling, countersinking, step drilling and then riveting together parts. It’s been I while since I needed to use the compressor, but I needed to use the rivet gun in a few places. I almost always use the Main Squeeze hand-squeezer for rivets.
I decided to take a break from wiring, and start back on the engine. Cracking open the baffling section, I made some progress on the first few steps, marking and trimming the doublers, and deburring parts.
Tonight I installed t-connectors on the Pitot and Static pneumatic lines, and routed all lines to their respective ports on the G5 and ADAHRS unit.
With that done, the panel wiring is complete!
Well almost complete, I still need to:
– safety wire some more connectors
– throughly inspect all wiring and fix all potential chafe points
– route the firewall-forward wires up to and through the firewall
– upgrade the battery-vertical power wire from #8 to #6 AWG
Tonight I installed a couple of adel clamps to hold the pitot static lines, keeping them clear of the sharp edges they pass near under the panel. The routing is a little weird because I don’t want to put too sharp of a bend in the tubes. The tubes come up out of the wiring channel, pass over the wiring frame I built, come out the bottom of the forward side of the sub panel, then up through a gap between the panel and sub panel. I plan to install t-connectors on the top of the shelf behind the PFD, sending air to both the G5 and the ADAHRS unit mounted on the back of the PFD..
I then mixed up some epoxy resin and glued some zip tie holders onto the shelf.
Over the last week I’ve been chipping away at the panel wiring in the evenings. It’s hard to measure progress sometimes because I’ve been spending a lot of time on very small tasks, and/or doing something one way only to do it again a different way.
The main accomplishment, however, has been installing the wiring channel that connects the center tunnel to the sub panel. This is a lightweight frame that allows the wiring and pitot static lines to neatly fit inside, keeping all the wiring out of sight and out of the way of the occupants. This was not as easy to install as I hoped. The problem is access to the rivets that attach the frame to the sub panel. On one side there is an existing frame, and on the other side are the many bundles of wiring. I ended up drilling out the rivets and removing the frame that was blocking my access. Then I set pop rivets in place, then reinstalled the frame I had removed.
Once I had that channel in place, I installed the cover and checked for clearance on all sides. I found the connector for the standby battery was just touching the connector for the CO detector. The standby battery is installed on a panel above the fuel pump, just forward of this wiring channel. The CO detector is installed on the backside of the cover that sits on the wiring channel.
To solve the issue I relocated the CO detector mount, moving it sideways and up. This required drilling out some rivets and making some new holes, but it was no big deal. It’s now in a position where the two connectors and their wiring runs are not contacting each other.
With all that work done, the whole area is looking much cleaner and tidier.
