I didn’t get to write a blog post yesterday, because I was in the workshop until well after bed time. We had a very productive day! We also had quite a few people in the Garaggio.
Greg came over right away in the morning. He just came back from a month in Bora Bora so I gave him the tour of progress since he left. Then he got to work on finishing the oil cooler mounting brackets.
Since the fuel distribution block goes in this area too, he also started working on a mount for that. He had everything hung for a while and I didn’t remember to take a photo of it, so when there is more progress, I’ll get a photo.
Jon was also here and he did various wiring tasks. He got the big power wires terminated at the firewall. Then installed more zip tie anchors where we needed them.
Jon also got the positive side of the power to the starter solenoid. We found we didn’t have the right terminals to finish up the solenoid wiring, so that will have to wait for those to come.
In between working with Jon and Greg on those projects, I got started labeling and organizing the spaghetti bowl of wires I allowed to develop with the nose gear harness. These heat shrink tuning labels are the “cats pajamas,” as Jon would say. They really make a nice way of keeping the wiring straight.
Once the rats nest was organized, I got to work figuring out the final routing for the harness. It is running through a hole aft of the gear motor, then across the bulkhead and under the avionics shelf to the panel. I think it is going to work well.
About the time I finalized the wiring path, we had a newbie in the Garaggio. My friend Eric, who has been a pilot for years and generously provided hangar space for Dick Keyt’s bonanza during the work party earlier this year, came over after work. Eric tinkers with various projects, and I think my evil plan worked. He seems to have been bitten by the airplane building bug. In fact, he is going to Oshkosh this weekend to do the composites educational workshop. I think we have a Velocity or a Cozy in our future!
Anyways, Eric is pretty handy around wire strippers, soldiering irons, and electrical schematics. Talk about perfect timing. Between the two of us, we finished wiring the new landing gear switches, the circuit breaker, and the electrical back up system.
During testing, we did have a few head scratching moments. The gear wouldn’t stop when it hit the up or down limit. It took a while to trace what happened, and I am sure glad Eric was here because I wouldn’t have found it.
The LED gear indicator in the handle of the gear switch requires a resister in series in the ground lead. Since we didn’t put one in, we fried one of the channels on the multi colored LED and caused a short. It was the blue color which we were going to use as a transit light. This short was not allowing the limit relays to stop the motor. Once we found that and disconnected the blue channel, everything worked normally again.
We are going to install the resistor and do without a transit light. Many airplanes don’t have them, and I can’t come up with a need for it. Alright, back out to the workshop for me.
the Garaggio 