Cleaning up the rats nest

I spent a few hours working through the punch list. One of the first things I wanted to do was clean up the wiring. The stuff in the avionics bay wasn't bad, but could be better. The stuff in the tunnel was a nightmare. I got off to a slow start, though, when I couldn't find the step stool needed to get in and out of the plane when the wings aren't on. It didn't take long to find, but it did remind me that the actual steps were not yet installed. I took care of that, and will surely regret it as I begin the long, painful process of learning not to bark my shins with them.

I disconnected roughly half of the J-box connectors and re-routed some of them. There were still a couple of bundles that were in need of some tie wraps to keep them nicely collected. I gave myself a bit of a scare, though. I though it would be a good idea to turn the Skyview on when I was done to make sure that I hadn't broken anything.

 TRANSPONDER FAIL! Uh-oh!

I removed the transponder connector to make sure none of the pins had been bent. It looked fine. I tried re-seating it half a dozen times to no avail. Finally an inspiration struck me: how about trying it with the Avionics switch turned on? That did the trick. So, mental note: the transponder only works when the Avionics switch is turned on. Imagine that!

The tunnel was a much bigger job, due both to the extent of the mess and the awkwardly inconvenient work location. Just getting the various wires untangled enough to allow them to be bundled and restrained was a herculean task. It looks a lot better now, but at the end of the day I probably made it look better at the cost of having introduced a plethora of sources of the type of spurious electronic interference that will drive me nuts for the next five years.

I had hoped to get the throttle and choke controls installed, but by the time I got that *&^@#$ heater cable put back in I had had enough. I did manage to get the cables pushed through the panel and firewall, but the business ends of them are just dangling out over the engine.

It is.... ALIVE!

You've seen those movies. The protagonist has spent years of his life chasing a dream, shunned by society for his off-the-wall ideas and pursuits. His goal? Why, to create life, of course! Finally comes the big denouement: he flips a switch, or captures a bolt of lightening, or fills a syringe and injects a biological concoction. There is a pregnant pause... the camera zooms in on the creature's eyes.... AND THEY OPEN!

"IT     IS     ALIVE!!" he shouts!

And so it was that I installed a DB9 connector on the GPS antenna cable, plugged it into the J-box, and turned the page to see what the next step was.

There wasn't one.

I'm done with the avionics!

So, what to do? After pondering it a moment, I decided that I would hook up the main ground wire to the battery and see what happened.

Well, nothing happened. That was to be expected - I had ensured that all of the power switches were off.

The big moment would come when I flipped the master switch to ON.

5

4

3

2

1

SWITCH ON!!

Nothing happened.

Rats.

But wait, I think I heard the master relay thunk, so power was in fact coursing through the braided metallic veins of the airplane.  No sign of life on the Skyview, though. The eyes remained steadfastly shut. But... the Hollywood movie creature never displays sentience right away - there is always the suspense of apparent failure.

I did what I normally do when faced with one of Van's Little Mysteries: I fired off a questioning text to Kyle, saxophone reed custodian for The Jackson Two. He asked a pretty pertinent question in return: "Is it plugged in?"

"Well, of COURSE it's plugged.... oh, wait."

You see, there has been this pair of white wires with a black connector on the end that I have been pushing out of my way for days now, waiting for Van's to tell me to plug them in somewhere. I was pretty sure they went into the back of the center switch box, what with that connector being of the right shape and to date unfilled with anything at all. And sure enough, Kyle told me to look for a  pair of white wires with a black connector on the end.

I plugged them in and turned on the master switch again.

Fans started to whir.

And then......

The creature opened his eyes!

He began to speak, but I didn't understand a word.

The newly sentient creatures always ask two questions: "Where am I?" followed by "Who am I?"

The first question he already knew.

We're at Bolton Field, KTZR.

 The big red X means that the second question is still in doubt. Skyview knew where it was, but did not yet know who it was. A quick consultation of the installation guide told me that Skyview had to be told the tail number of the airplane before it would be completely cognizant of its identity.

And so it was...

Tribulations

I had another occurrence of a Harbor Freight tool causing me some problems, but we'll get to that later. There are times when The Freight can be pretty irritating - just last week I dropped in to buy a handful of trifling stuff, only to find that (yet again!!) their POS (point-of-sale, but the other meaning too) system was locked up. Twelve Angry Men is more than just a Henry Fonda movie, if the visages of the impatient customers were any indication. I turned around and left.

Continuing on my stumbling path down the final stretch, I started out by changing a fuse. Bill H. had left me a note alerting me to the fact that the 2 amp fuse that I had put in the 'START' slot of my fuse panel might be insufficient and that a discussion with Van's had won him dispensation to replace it with a 3 amp fuse. While the plan page (for which there is no newer revision than what I have) stubbornly holds to the lesser of the two....

... the spare fuse block has seen the light.

I started out easy (or so I thought) with a couple of small-box installations. First was the Emergency Locator Transmitter (ELT) pilot-controlled ARM-ON switch. The primary means of turning on the ELT is to fly into something solid, but there are cases, such as surviving an off-airport landing way out in the boonies, where the pilot may need to manually turn on the device. The switch is normally set to the 'ARM' position.

The switch is held in place with irritatingly small nuts.

I'm not sure there is a small enough wrench or socket available for these nuts, but even if there is, I don't have one. I resorted to vise grips.

The ELT switch comes with labels and such that would show the correct positioning of the switch, but Van's tells us not to use them; they will be sending their own version eventually. The intercom gets installed under the ELT switch, but the ELT switch is small enough behind the panel for that to not be as big a hassle as it could have been.

The ELT itself rides back in the baggage area. It uses an internal antenna mounted to a little slab of aluminum. The plans show the ELT antenna mount being screwed into three open holes in the structural cross bar.

Imagine my surprise when I found those ostensibly open holes to not be open!

I went back and found the page where the rivets were originally put in - I was correct in putting them in. There may be a revision page out by now that has current/future builders leave those holes open. I kind of doubt it, though.

The holes will need nutplates behind them. A screw gets run through a nutplate backwards so the 'ears' of the nutplate can be used as a drilling template.

Getting those nutplates up into the cross bar was an exercise in finger dexterity, and served to remind me that I hate exercise of any variety!

The plans then call for the mounting of the ELT mount to the side of the plane. Perusing the contents of the big box that the ELT came in left me wondering "What mount??"

Oh, there it is! Already mounted to the ELT.

Cleco it in place - nothing to it!

Find these oddly shaped rivets. They're hidden in one of the brown paper bags.

I've never had an ELT that had a warning buzzer, but it's a pretty good idea. If you accidentally set off the ELT and don't know it, you'll be on the hook for a $175 replacement battery if you let it run for more than an hour. That, and you'll have the FAA and possibly the Coast Guard breathing furiously down your neck.

The buzzer needs a second ground wire and a pair of splices crimped onto it.

And here it is, neatly installed.

As I plugged in the little connector in the front of it, though, I nearly jumped out of my skin when the buzzer immediately started emitting a very loud and very strident series of beeps. The ELT was on!! How could that have happened? I turned it off just as quickly as I could (once they're on, they assume that you want them to stay on) find the sheet of "accidental activation" instructions included with the unit. That got it turned off, but did not answer the question of why it turned on in the first place. And the bulk of the instructions provided with the ELT were on CD-ROMs, which are utterly useless to me in the hangar.

I decided to shift gears until such time as I could go home and read them. It is only permissible to activate an ELT for testing purposes at the top of the hour (and even then, you only get a five minute window and the activation must be brief) so testing the problem would take awhile. When I got home, I scanned through the docs looking for a trouble shooting guide. One thing I noticed was that the drawings of the remote switch varied in which switch position was 'ON' and which was 'ARM', with 'ARM' being the position I wanted. And there I was, with no labels installed to help me tell the difference. Fortunately, I had pictures of someone else's panel that I could refer to. Sure enough, I had the switch set in the 'ON' position.

Duh.

But that all came later. I decided to finish the installation of the ADAHRS box, which is the box that does all of the air data calculations for the Skyview. As I was looking at the plans, I noticed that Van's doesn't like the DB-9 clam-style backshell for this particular connection, so I had to use an alternative style.

This style is slightly more complicated to put together the first, second, and third time you try one.

With that done, I went ahead and installed the ADAHRS box to the two supports provided (having been warned by Kyle, Work Avoidance Technician for The Jackson Two) before riveting them onto the airplane, and I am glad I did! It would have been a nightmare otherwise. By the time I riveted those brackets in, the ADAHRS had its pitot and static lines connected, and the DB-9 and the OAT plugs installed. The wiring back there will still need to be straightened out, but I was getting cramps from all of the contortions required when scrunching around in the baggage area.

I was just about done for the day, but I decided I'd install the GPS antenna. It looked easy enough.

It wasn't. I couldn't get it to align with the provided screw holes because the wire bundle was being obstructed by the hole in the mounting panel.

I filed a notch in the mount and was then able to screw the antenna to the mount, but when I went to install the mount onto the shelf on the firewall, I had the same problem.

I filed another slot, this time into the shelf. Unfortunately, I may have gone a little too Shogun when filing the edges to smooth them out. The Harbor Freight file broke.

There then ensued a prolonged search for the lost piece of file. The search, to date, has been futile and will have to continue before I can move on. Here's a lesson, though: when using Harbor Freight files, think 'Geisha', not 'Shogun'.

At least I was done enough to get the antenna mounted.

Smoke...

It won't be long now until I apply power to the airplane and its associated subsystems. In the vernacular this is known as a "smoke test," perhaps for obvious reasons, perhaps not. The idea is, of course, that no smoke appears at all, and if it does, that it comes out of something relatively cheap, easy to replace, or if you're really lucky, both.

Because I'm getting close to the point where all of the smart little boxes get installed into the airplane, I thought it might be a good time to take the instrument panel parts out to be powder coated. For those not in the know, powder coating is:

...a type of coating that is applied as a free-flowing, dry powder. The main difference between a conventional liquid paint and a powder coating is that the powder coating does not require a solvent to keep the binder and filler parts in a liquid suspension form. The coating is typically applied electrostatically and is then cured under heat to allow it to flow and form a "skin". The powder may be a thermoplastic or a thermoset polymer. It is usually used to create a hard finish that is tougher than conventional paint. Powder coating is mainly used for coating of metals, such as household appliances, aluminium extrusions, and automobile and bicycle parts.

I want you to make note of a couple of things. First is that it "create[s] a hard finish that is tougher than conventional paint." I thought this would be desirable for the instrument panel. In retrospect, it would have been desirable in a lot of other places too, but it's too late for that. Second, note that it is "cured under heat."

Here's why that matters. When I stopped by the hangar to pick up the instrument panel pieces, I impulsively also grabbed the two steps that will be mounted outside the airplane to provide a means to climb up onto the wing in order to get into the plane. These steps will see rough duty, and they were already starting to rust just from sitting around in the humid hangar, so I thought I'd go ahead and get them coated too. Doing so would add $25 to the bill, but I thought it was worth it. I dropped them off last week and was told to expect a call midweek to let me know when they were done. Well, I got a call all right!

"Hey, I'm calling from the powder coating shop and I was wondering if there was something inside those steps you wanted powder coated. We put them in the oven and they're spewing clouds of smoke!"

Uh-oh! I had completely forgotten that Van's had me pour fuel tank sealant down into them to keep water out!! That stuff smells to high heaven anyway - I can't imagine the smell of it burning! Soooo, the steps didn't get powder coated. But the panel looks great!

I am in the middle of what has been described as the hardest part of the Skyview conversion, which is the routing of some wire bundles from the avionics bay back to the back end of the plane where the main computer will be installed. I pulled the biggest bundle through a few days ago, so all that was left was a pair of two wire bundles. These are the ones that I used heat shrink on to protect the little gold pins. I may have shared that I thought that idea would prove to be either brilliant or stupid and only time will tell.

It did.

It's not a great place to work from a comfort point-of-view.

But I managed to get both bundles through without breaking off any of the pins. The heat shrink was a brilliant idea!

No, really, I was thrilled! You just can't tell because the 90% humidity made working conditions pretty ugly.

So there it is! A lot of work for just eight wires, no?

I sure hope none of them smoke!

More travel planning...

Fresh off of my amazing to trip to San Francisco to rub elbows with the Ferrari crowd and race head-to-head against a professional IndyCar driver came another interesting email which read something like this: "Hey Dave, can I count on you to be on deck for another product announcement trip in case I can't get away from work?"

"Well," I immediately thought, "that depends." I read further. The details were, in a word, intriguing:

Wanted to see if you'd be interested in a potential event for *Need for Speed Most Wanted*, hosted at the Porsche Driving School in Leipzig, Germany.

The event would take place on Sunday, Sept 30th. EA would take care of your travel to Germany and hotel of course, and the event would be a full day at the Porsche driving school, followed by hands on time with *Need for Speed Most Wanted*'s single and multiplayer modes before the game hits shelves on October 30th. Here's the breakdown of activities included.

    - Hands-on never-before-seen *Need for Speed Most Wanted* gameplay
    - Porsche driving school drive-along (ride the famed Porsche track driven by a professional race car driver)
    - Porsche off-road training (hands-on driving at the Porsche off-road course)

Not surprisingly, they had me at "Porsche." I replied back in the affirmative in whatever measure of time it is that falls between "second" and "instant," and that was before I even had a chance to Google the Porsche Driving School in Leipzig, the results of which are here. It looks like a lot of fun, although I'd be lying if I didn't say that I would prefer to do my own driving on the paved track too! And that's not to say that the off-road track doesn't look interesting; it just doesn't look fast. But hey, a chance to drive a Porsche? What's not to like??

I will spare you the suspense that I endured over the ensuing couple of days waiting to see if I would be going or not and come right out and say it: I'm going!

So, let the preparations begin. Step one was to find Leipzig on a map. Despite having been stationed in Germany for two years, I had never been to Leipzig. It turns out that there is a reason for that: the Berlin Wall blocked it off from western access a week after I was born and the wall was not knocked down until three years after I had returned from my two year tour of duty.

Step two was to address the issue of the language barrier. My German language skills have eroded to the point where all I can do is proclaim a situation of pecuniary embarrassment: "Ich habe kein geld." Oh, and I suppose I could ask for a beer in a pinch. There's no chance of re-learning the language to any kind of meaningful level at my age and with the short time available, so I decided to see if I could lean on 21st century technology. And you know what? I can! Look what you can get for $4.99 these days:



What could go wrong?

Seriously, though, isn't that amazing? There are two nice things about it beyond the unbelievably low price: it has the entire translation dictionary stored in onboard memory so there is no need to have internet access available to use it, and it will also allow me to type in text to be translated. The latter is pretty important because as you've seen in the video, the voice recognition can get confused. It will also be important for translating signs, menus, directions, etc. I will need another, non-language translation device to go with it, though. I'll have to get something to allow me to plug in my battery charger and translate foreign electricity to English electricity. Their wall plugs are of a different voltage and design over there.

That's not happening until the end of September, so progress continues on the airplane. When last we met, I had broken one of the the little gold pins off of the end of the trim wire bundle. I wasn't sure where to get a replacement, but that turned out to be easy. Kyle, drum stick whittler and bagpipe tuner for The Jackson Two, had also broken a pin off and had ordered replacements, some of which he had left over. Still heavily into the infatuation phase with his completed RV-12, I didn't even have to suggest that he fly up to Bolton with a pin and the specialty tool required to crimp it onto the wire.

The crimping was so simple as to be a non-event, and chock full of confidence I proceeded to install the pins in the big 37-pin connector that will attach to the main junction box. Interestingly, the wire bundle contains two white wires and the plans make no distinction between the two when it comes to pin location in the connector. Also interesting is that the music input wire bundle also contains two white wires, and it too goes into the 37-pin connector. While the plans don't seem to care which order each of the respective white wires go, they do care where which two holes are for the trim wires and which two are for the music wires.

I immediately put the music wires in the wrong holes.

That's bad, you see, because while it is easy to get those pins to snap into place, it is much harder to get them back out again.

Enough said about that.

Shamed, embarrassed, and disgusted, I quit for the night and we went over to the airport BBQ place and had dinner. I haven't been back to the hangar since.

Constructive Destruction

I've spent a week with the new car and there are some observations that I've made. The first couple of days were mostly spent getting acquainted with the feel of it. The SLK is a little different from other cars that I've had in a lot of little ways, but in one rather big way it is unique from everything I've driven before: I cannot sense my speed. The ride remains smooth and rock steady from 25 mph to 80 mph, and at anything above 50 it gets very hard to judge the speed. The speedo helps with that, of course, but only when I can see it. Why wouldn't I be able to see it? Well, there are a couple of other things I've learned that have a bearing on that.

One is that the Mercedes seats leave much to be desired in the area of lower back support, at least when configured in a position that would feel most natural to someone that has spent the last year driving a four-door sedan. It was only a couple of days ago when I was enjoying the twisty and nearly deserted rural roads that I prefer to use when visiting the Schmetterling Corporate HQ that I decided to try for a sportier seating position. I lowered the seat as low as it would go (which is essentially all the way down to the floor), reclined the back position way back, and lowered the steering wheel down to a Formula 1 race car position.

Voilà, not only was the feeling far more sportier than it had been, but my lumbar was perfectly supported as well. The only downside was that the massive wooden steering wheel completely blocked the speedometer. Considering the difficulty in judging speed based on the ride and sound of the car over the road, this presented something of a problem. It wasn't much of a problem on the deserted and law-enforcement-free country roads, but it will be a problem on the highway. I suppose that's why I have a cruise control.

I also discovered throughout the first week the painful fact that the car gets dirty. This realization first manifested itself when I noticed the remains of a rather large and juicy inspect splattered across the front fascia. This despite the assurances from the Mercedes-Benz promotional materials that indicated that Wiccan pagan spells had been factory-installed for the sole purpose of causing insects and small birds to divert their flight paths to avoid such unsightly events. Also untrue was the claim that the paint, having been derived from ground Unicorn husks and the cores of black pearls, would repel all forms of dust. That falsity was most prominently displayed on the back of the car and on the front wheels, the latter being nearly black with brake dust after just one week.

The brake dust issue is well known and is, in fact, endemic to many German engineered cars. The non-ceramic brake pads used in the sportier cars are much preferred due to their excellent performance when cold, and for the terrific feel they give when driving spiritedly. And, I suspect, spirited driving is the norm for the SLK cars. For me, though, the problem was again related to my inability to feel how fast the car was moving. It's a heavy-ish car, and I found that I was having to use a lot more brake when entering turns than I should have needed. This was, I think, due to the fact that I was entering the turns in a quickly moving heavy car that I had failed to get slowed down soon enough. I'm getting a better feel for when I need to begin slowing now, so that problem is mostly resolving itself.

That said, I had to wash the car today. I guess there is a part of me that missed owning a car worthy of a weekly bucket, sponge, and chamois homage, but that part was most definitely not my lower back. This car is much like the Miata in that it's small enough that there isn't all that much to wash, but the parts that are most in need of washing are only inches off of the ground and a lot of bending over is required to get at them.

All of this is, of course, nothing compared to the pride of ownership one feels when driving such a fine machine. In fact, one must be careful to avoid any feelings of superiority over the multitudes of inferior motoring machines one must share the roads with. Unless.... unless you work in a ritzy neighborhood. If that is the case, and it is for me, it will not be long at all before you get put back in your place.

Meet the Lamborghini Aventador. 700 hp, V-12 engine. 217 mph top speed. You aren't likely to beat this guy if you're trying to get into his lane from a stoplight, either. He can go 0 to 60 in less than 3 seconds,  Gas mileage? Ha, you should be embarrassed that you even asked. I asked anyway: 13 mpg. And the other uncomfortable question? They start at $376.000.

I also received an interesting letter from Van's: please send the remainder of the balance due for your avionics kit. That means it's ready to ship! That changed the nature of the work I did on the airplane this weekend because now I know that I will be needing access to the wiring areas. That meant that I would have to remove a lot of stuff. Par for the course, of course. A hundred steps forward, ninety steps back. 'Tis the nature of the game. I don't mind it all that much since this is a brand new airplane. Why is that important? Because working on an older airplane is an exercise in frustration when it comes to removing rounded-out screws that some ham-fisted idiot put in.

In fact, the first screw came out with nary a turn:

That's one of the two screws that hold the flap handle stopper in place. Not a super critical screw, but somewhat surprising to find it in that state nonetheless.

Very soon thereafter, I came across a rounded-out screw! Who did that??? Oh, wait... it was me.

I went and found my trusty Harbor Freight (The Home of Worthless Screw Extractors) screw extractors. These are tapered, reverse-threaded bits that worm their way down into a hole drilled into the top of the screw and then dig in. Once they're set, you just remove the screw by twisting the extractor. That's as easy as can be, assuming that you can drill down into the screw. Unfortunately for me, the drill bit broke off down inside the screw. You know what a drill bit won't drill through? Another drill bit. It's some kind of professional courtesy, I suppose.

I ended up cutting a slot in the top of the screw with the Dremel cutting disk. That allowed be to remove the screw with a BFS.

I quickly became irritated with working around the dangling shoulder belts, so I took a break after removing the bad screw to get them restrained somewhere more or less out of the way.

Then it was back to removing the dozens upon dozens of floorboard screws.

I ultimately ended up having to use the Dremel trick twice more to remove rounded-out screws. I know what's causing the screw rounding problem (see photo above) - sometimes I forget to unlock the clicky-torquey thing on the drill before using it to drive in screws. When I forget, the screw bit keeps spinning in the screw after it has reached final snugness, thus almost instantly ruining the screw.

So at the end of the day, the airplane looks just like it did a year ago.