Starting to route harness, and relocating ELT
TLDR
- Started to route the wiring harness
- Relocated the ELT
Detail
Routing the wiring harness
I will admit, I have been dreading this part of the work. I am super unfamiliar with the electrical. Midwest Panel Builders did such a wonderful job making the harness for me, and I am very anxious about accidentally breaking a wire and spending eternity debugging them.
But I suppose I have to start somewhere.
I first put the entire fuselage harness on the ground, and roughly mapped out where they would go.
Then I set it in the center fuselage, and run it through the center fuselage from the rack to tail.
The most difficult part is the main spar. I have so many things going on in this area: a bunch of control tubes, rudder cable, flap actuator, control sticks, auto-pilot, etc. Running the harness through this area without damaging anything took an extra level of care.
Wing connectors and control stick connectors
Two connectors proved to be the most difficult: the W1/W2 wing connector, and the GH1/GH2 control stick connectors. They needed to pass through the tiny space in between the main spar. Fortunately, the GH connectors could pass the main spar at a certain angle. I basically just twisted the GH connectors until they were able to go through the main spars.
But the wing connectors just couldn’t go through. I am pretty sure I will need to depin them and get the wires to run though, then re-assemble the connectors.
ELT connectors
Another issue is with the ELT connectors.
So I previously installed the ELT on a rib under the rear passenger seat. The ELT happens to block a lightening hole there.
When I feed the harness through, the ELT d-sub connector cannot reach the ELT. None of the lightening holes are large enough to get the connector through except the previously blocked hole.
I considered my options: depin the connector and run the wire, or move the ELT to a different location and let the wire go through the big lighten hole.
I decided to move the ELT. Because to me, remove a few rivets is 10 times easier than redoing a d-sub, Let alone I don’t even have the necessary tools to do that.
So I spent the next hour or so removing the ELT from its rib location, and drilled a few new holes on the airplane bottom skin to install the ELT. All the wires ran through and reach their corresponding connection happily after the relocation.
