Listen to the airplane

With what I consider the hardest part of the rewiring job over, it was time to turn to easier ones. I only had a day before I had to leave on my next trip, so I wanted to just go in and look at some wiring that had perplexed me on the right side of the nose. Put the kettle on, turned on a little Enya, and I had full intention of working on those puzzling wires, but instead, like a cat trying to show you exactly where to scratch them behind the ears, the airplane drew me to the left side of the avionics compartment, and I spent some time rerunning some wires to the master solenoid.

In a very mellow frame of mind, and having moved on to some new Willie Nelson, I took a look at those wires.

and came up with a simple solution. Had to stop there and go to work, but it's waiting for me, and I patted Osp on the nose before I left, and thanked her. 

Sometimes, the airplane leads you where and when you need to go.

The Big Snip

Since i had all the wire bundles opened up, it was an opportunity to add labels to the wiring. Yes, this is an ancient label maker, I've since found out one roll of this heat shrink could have bought a new maker and a couple rolls of tape. (but it did make 1/8" heat shrink tubes, which the new one I've got on order does not.

Hopefully I'll never be reopening the bundles, but if I do, it will be easier to sort through them. I'll shrink them down later when I'm tying the bundles up.

More Adel clamps, these to run the wires under the radio rack to the left side of the panel. These are big ones for ease of installation, later I'll be replacing them with smaller ones that do not allow the wires to move. 

And it's time to check everything two, three times, and start cutting. 

Much nicer.

I've needed a way to make quick disconnects of wires, with the small amount of room behind the panel and size of some of the opening the standard, large plastic multi-connectors were not an option.  I'm not sure if there's any problem the VAF have not figured out, but it was suggested to just use d-sub connectors, wrapped in heat shrink. For some reason dsubs intimidated me, which meant it was something I needed to learn.

Yes, at 59 my eyes aren't 15/15 anymore, but those dubs are SMALL!!!

Warning lights all dressed up. Note that to fit through the hole they have to be staggered.
 

One persons suggestion was to put heat shrink around the connectors, then tie them off with wire lacing cord instead of heat shrinking them. 

When I got to adding the connectors to the landing gear warning system alert lights and its itty, bitty wires/mounting holes, the tie-off-heat-shrink method was impractical because of it's bulk.

I tried knife/handshake connectors, also far too bulky. Things were looking grim. 

The solution (again, tip of the balding head to VAF) was clear heat shrink, carefully shrunk with the tip of the soldering iron on each end to hold it in place.

You gotta be cautious with the iron, but not too cautious. If you stay too far away from the connector the wires can separate, something I would not have noticed had I not been using clear heat shrink (Clear heat shrink has become my new favorite invention.) and would have been a nightmare to troubleshoot.

In the meantime, the area under the radio where the landing gear and flap selector is was a wiring nightmare. It took 3 days. Wish I could figure out a way to make this into a separate panel and removable, if we end up redoing the panel again it will be solely to do so. TJ may may have an idea, and knowing him, will whip out a new panel in a matter of minutes. (Ok, maybe not minutes, but very quickly.) Actually since writing this I'm even more convinced that I need to make it removable, and think I know how. It won't look as nice, aesthetically, but if I don't and I need to make a repair in the future I'll either have to pull the entire panel, or swear a lot doing the repair.

There's a small terminal strip off the starter switch that feeds a few systems,

a visit to my old RC airplane toolbox yielded some 4-40 blind nuts to mount it with. 

I was deep into the landing gear sub-pane one day when someone yelled from the gate, asking to be let in. I was NOT having a good day and did not want to get distracted with someone who just wanted to banter and distract with the usual So when's it gonna fly? harharhar... comments. I yelled out the code (since they had called me by name), but a few minutes later heard a familiar voice saying "She's looking good, Steve.". I was delighted to see an old friend, Hal Beatty, who was one of my mentors at the Heritage Flight Museum and had retired last year. A bad day suddenly got better.

Hal was driving an old Ford he had just completed restoring. That's not a restoration, it's a work of art.

Ok, Power up again. I've got a small electrical glitch to chase (there always is) but so far it looks like I did all the other connections right.

One embarrassing thing happened, though. I had gone over what I thought was EVERY switch, checking that they were all Off, but missed the landing gear switch. I had the breaker pulled, and must have thought that was the switch, too, so after initial powerup I started turning systems on, one at a time. To my horror, as soon as I pushed in the gear cb the left main started retracting, but I was able to quickly yank it back out before it got too far. Luckily, a hangar neighbor was there, and we both were able to lift Osp up enough to allow the gear to reverse and get back down in the locked position. Jim laughed his ass off about it when I told him, had me check a couple things, and luckily there was no damage except to my wounded pride. Lesson learned.

Groundhog Days

"What are you doing today, honey?"
Working on the electrical system.
"Didn't you work on that last week?"
Yes.
"What are you working on next week?"
The electrical system.



We're getting there, we're getting there, and we've come a long way (I know not to touch both terminals of a capacitor at once, for instance). Will start the final trimming tonight, may be able to power her up again this weekend.

I'll explain this later

....

Worms

 You know what they say, hours and hours and hours of boredom...

punctuated by moments of inspiration. I thought I might be able to save room/make it easier to repair if I rearranged the ground buss longitudinally, but it didn't work out. Had to try, though.

This is how much wire will be eliminated on this side from the Faststack bundles.

The right side will be held in place by L-brackets, and the Adel clamps will be attached to them. 

Another moment of inspiration while staring out the window. These are Nite Ize gear ties, temporarily replacing the Adel clamps with them allows me to easily move bundles in and out while working on wires.

Final bundling means undoing all the zip ties (don't ask how many I've used), and the gear ties work great, allowing me to quickly cinch a group of wires together with one hand.

Another handful of wire that will be removed when I get home, as I continue to tighten up the wiring. 

 It's getting closer.....

Inside looking out

Something a little different, long hours boring over the ocean at cruise make you look at things a little differently.

Have it your way...

This is the default engine page as the Skyview Classic comes from the factory. If you wanted to, you could fly almost any airplane with this generic set up.

But half the fun of homebuilding is having things your way. I spent a layover watching the engine configuration video, by the time I came home I was rarin' to start pushing buttons and twiddling knobs. After getting the honeydos done, I spent a jetlagged afternoon in my hangar messing around and have a start, I know it will change as things go.

From L-R, is tach time, I reconfigured the CHT and EGT to vertical bars instead of horizontal, engine oil temp and pressure, then RPM and manifold pressure. Upper right is battery voltage and amps, lower right is fuel flow and quantity.

Dynon also allows a variety of ways to display your information (see also: finger fire), 100%, 50%, and 20%. This is 50/50 with the Map mode, the next challenge will be to find a way to present similar information across all three sizes of displays.

The most common things said in a glass cockpit

What's it doing?
Why is it doing it?
How do I stop it?

Taking a break from running wires, I've been sitting down and working with the Dynon, customizing my display for what I want.

With somewhere around 20,000 hours flying glass cockpit aircraft, in everything from the ATR turboprop to the 787, I've come to appreciate the many advantages modern avionics bring to aviation. HOWEVER, at work I am in a multi-crew environment, where one person flys the airplane, allowing to other pilot to put their full attention on twiddling knobs and touching buttons, taking the time to go through an OODA loop, something a single engine, single pilot cannot do.I've seen so many GA pilots get so enraptured with the magic of glass they forget they're also supposed to be flying an airplane, or they get confused, go down a wrong path into a "finger fire" and make bad situations worse. Even with our disciplined, structured training programs at work we sometimes have crews fall down the rabbit hole (guilty), best thing we can do is learn from them.

One thing that's funny to me is to draw on my widely varied background, such as years in retail sales. For instance, did you know that humans are horizontal scanners, and anything presented in a horizontal format tends to be skipped/scanned, whereas if you want to get someone's attention you put the display in a vertical layout? Check it out next time you're in a retail store, do you scan over and notice things that are displayed horizontally, or vertically? There's a reason. (although, hmmm.... is it a Western thing, since we read horizontally, as opposed to Asian writing that's vertical and read top to bottom? How about those who read languages from right to left, as opposed to those who read left to right?? Anyone know?

What does this have to do with Dynon? Check out the display below. Notice that some instruments are horizontal vs vertical.

and as a flashback, remember this?

Of check out this 1960s image of the XB-70 cockpit with vertical tapes and round dials. No horizontal displays here.

When I get home I'll take some time and see if there are instruments Dynon have limited to horizontal vs vertical displays, should be interesting. Fortunately, Dynon has produced some excellent videos about how to rearrange their displays, here's one of several I've been watching.

And of course, a few minutes of guidance from Syd saves me hours of staring at a problem. 

Take a break. Like many of my generation, I grew up flying/crashing Cox PT-19s, there's one next door at the Heritage Flight Museum, and to get to work on it once in a while is just plane fun.

Work. Narita.

Things will get better.