Whew. Well, I didn’t get all the rest of the wire laid in today like I’d hoped, but I’m getting really close. To just summarize at the beginning here, all I have left to do is to connect audio out from the Skyview displays to the intercom, run a dimmer control connection from one display to the intercom, and put in the stub for the Skyview GPS antenna from the displays.
I kind of thought about trying to push through and get those done tonight, but all but one of those connections will involve window splicing, since the displays get tied together. I’d rather save that for another day. Plus I’m not quite sure how to handle the audio output; best practice would call for using a shielded bundle for something like this but I dunno how to handle the split between the displays with that. Something to stew over before I commit, I suppose.
So that’s what’s left. I only closed out a few branches today but some of them were big ones; for example, the EMS branch (27 pins), the main/essential buses, and the FWF stuff (mostly the other ends of those EMS pins). The latter two didn’t just have a bunch of conductors, they were also super long runs and really fun to manage on the table as I kept adding to them. I was glad to be able to bundle them up permanently so they won’t keep sort of springing apart and throwing wire ends everywhere.
There was also some more thinking to do; for one thing, I got down to working with the CPI2 ECU branch, which is where I’ll need to add in some existing harness stuff that came with the CPI2. In the end, I did as little as possible here; really just the RPM output wires to the EMS and the ground runs. Everything else I’m going to add once this is in the plane, otherwise it’ll make this harness work an order of magnitude more messy. Some of this is unavoidable; for example, the coil and crank trigger harnesses are already terminated on the engine end, so they’ll have to be fed through the firewall and into the cabin, the exact opposite direction from how I’ll be feeding the big harness. The other pertinent runs are those to the physical panel switches, and since those will be very short and virtually point-to-point, it seems better to just do them in place.
I did get one unexpected surprise today. My neighbor Leonard, a veteran builder and tech counselor, happened by on his golf cart and stopped in to take a look at the build. It’s always nice to have an experienced set of eyes stop by and not scream in abject terror at my workmanship.
Welp, that’s it for tonight. More to come tomorrow…