The last two days I have continued to work on the instrument panel wiring. Now that the majority of the panel signal wiring is done, I turned to wiring up all the power leads to their respective ports on the VPX Power system. Since all the power leads were marked and ran to the area of the VPX, it was as easy as finding the component on my diagram, crimping, labeling and plugging in the pin.
I decided to buy my own crimping tool for the VPX so that I can perform maintenance tasks in the future. The tool is said to be as good as the machine shop one, but takes a little more work. It took a little bit to figure out how the tool work, but the problem was mostly because the die that holds the pin was a too small by a fraction of a fraction of an inch. So I lightly sanded the die cut outs and the pins inserted much easier.
Once I got the crimping down, it was just a matter of getting the wires snapped into the right plug – so much easier than all the circuit breakers a panel like this would normally take. There were a few components that weren’t wired up – such as the trim switches, but that can be done easily once the panel is in place.
After a full day of just connecting the power leads, the next day I turned to preparing the panel for installation in the fuselage. I ran the static and pitot tubing to both of the EFIS screens as well as the AutoPilot. I decided to run the tubing behind the mid bulkhead so that it was out of the way of the wiring area yet easy enough to service in the future. I also ran the tubing for the Angle of Attack system (AOA). Though I still have to determine if I can run this on both screens or just a single screen.
I then moved onto securing and cleaning up wire runs that were complete. I removed zip ties and used lacing cord. I also applied silicon tape where needed for abrasion protection. I applied some 3M abrasion tape around the mid panel cutout for the GTN to ensure the wire harness doesn’t get rubbed. I drilled a hole for the RG400 GPS antenna to reach the back of the GTN cage as well. I removed unused wires from the EFIS harness (audio cable on second EFIS).
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