Author Archives: pclifton

Prep for turtledeck riveting

First up this morning, before heading over for the usual Sunday morning coffee across the runway, I got Josie’s help with dimpling the rest of the turtledeck skin. There weren’t a ton of holes to take care of here, and … Continue reading

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Tail cleanup and prep

Today was just getting stuff ready for the tail riveting, roughly along three lines: removing stuff from the tail area and cleaning, working on the turtledeck skin, and making sure there’s nothing else I want to get done before turning … Continue reading

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2

GPS-175 rack fixed

This was potentially a useful discovery – what if simply removing the spacers was enough to get the backshell to engage with the unit? So I went to work finishing the extraction of the old rivets, then clecoed the angles … Continue reading

Posted in Avionics, Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2

Pitot line routing, done

In the next bay aft, the situation is similar, except there’s a much longer run between bulkheads, which means more opportunity for the cables to meet the lines. To help prevent this, I added a zip tie pad on the … Continue reading

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Pitot line routing

Well, I thought this would be a pretty straightforward evening of work. All I needed to do was to pull the pitot and AoA lines back through the conduit and figure out how to route them to the ADAHRS shelf. … Continue reading

Posted in Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Finished verifying tail wiring

Posted in Avionics, Electrical, Fuselage | Hours Logged: 1.5

Tail strobe wire routing

 So that was my “go ahead and do this” point. There was a bit more consideration for locating the passthrough hole, since the tailspring socket is on the other side of the bulkhead, but I worked out a good location … Continue reading

Posted in Electrical, Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2

More avionics tinkering

Mostly sort of tinkering around tonight. I did decide that I wanted to try and verify a few more things before moving on to the canopy; basically this is me wanting to nail down components in the tail as much … Continue reading

Posted in Avionics | Hours Logged: 1

Avionics are alive!

From that point, I started adding things back until I was powering both busses again, and I was able to get the entire Skyview system up and running. I configured all the network devices, got an initial hack at a … Continue reading

Posted in Avionics, Electrical, Fuselage | Hours Logged: 2.5

Grounding: DONE

 At this point, I decided it was time to work towards actually powering up the panel. There was still a decent amount of work to be done before that, mainly from a quality-control (read: avoiding release of the magic smoke) … Continue reading

Posted in Avionics, Electrical, Fuselage | Hours Logged: 4