Wire on the bench
We wired the panel on the bench, placed this in the plane, ran all the wires and hooked them up at the terminal ends. This allowed us to get really nice tight wraps and streatched straight runs before we even thought of riviting the top skin. With three of us working on this panel project, we had gone over this a dozen times or so. We did volt checks, visual checks, electrical checks and then hooked up the battery to do checks on the radios, transponder, guages....the works. We found two wires reversed at the oil sensor (low oil warning) and corrected.
Then we got all excited, but checked one more time to see if there was anything visual that we needed to do. We then riveted on the top skin and went to work installing the front windshield and glassed it all in. This weekend, while working on placing the servo to the auto pilot in the wing, I asked my partner "where are the wires for the fuel tank floats?"
We went back to the fuselage to find that we had wired the two fuel guages to the buss bar but had not run terminal wires to each wing root. AAARRRGG
Now we get to experience the contortionist position to add the two wires (one to each guage) and squeeze these into the already wrapped and straight wire runs to each wing. We now understand the true feeling to the Southwest Airlines commercial tag line "Do you want to get away?"
Three people, six eyeballs, detailed drawings and we looked at this for a month and we still missed two lengths of wire. Sheesh. We went back to the detailed drawings and sure enough, the two wires had *not* been highlighted in yellow as completed. Fun, fun.
Pat Garboden
Ozark, MO
Todd Wiechman
Building in Wichita, KS
RV9-A 942WG (reserved) O-235 w/ slider, Catto two blade FP
RV9-A 942PT (reserved) O-320 w/tip-up, Sensenich FP