Harness Building on the Bench
After a lot of planning, its time to start building the avionics harness on the bench! A lot of time here, but not necessarily a lot of pictures.
Construction
ELT Installation
I decided to install the ELT in the tail of the airplane behind the baggage compartment. This gave good access in the event of battery change, but also pushed weight as far aft as possible. With my angle valve engine, weight aft is a good thing.
Avionics layout, test panel fab, and bus layout planning
A lot of work here. First I fabricated a second mock panel. Based off the corrections needed from the first mock panel. This has enabled me to really nail the spacing of my instruments. Further it has enabled me to get the main GDU screen almost perfectly centered. I’m really happy with the symmetry of this panel.
Next up was figuring out exactly how to lay out the avionics behind the panel, and where to place the busses. A lot of this work was literally moving something and then staring at it for awhile, then moving something else. After a lot of trial and error I got what I wanted.
I also continued fabrication of the avionics shelf that will be behind the instrument panel.
Finally, I did some bench testing power-ups of all the avionics.
