Bonehead!

I called Van's the other day to request my documentation packet. This is the collection of paperwork that I need to fill out and submit back to them to prompt them to send me a Bill of Sale. It also causes them to send an FAA Form 8130-15, or at least I hope it does, because that is one daunting form! It's much like a tax form in that the only thing more opaque to the casual reader than the form itself is the instructions for how to use it. And, as we will see a little later in this post, my reading comprehension of even the simplest instructions can be, now and then, quite lacking.

Van's customer service is always a pleasure to work with, and this interaction was true to form:

"Hi, I'm builder number such-and-such, and I need my documentation packet."

Cynthia: "Oh, congratulations!"

They clearly know that this means that the plane is almost done!

On the other hand, my dealings with the FAA have just begun. The FAA, not surprisingly, become very interested in my goings on when it appears likely that I will be taking to the skies and overflying innocent ground-bound citizens in a home made airplane. Can't argue that, right? They should take at least a cursory look at the quality of the assembly job before putting the citizenry at risk. I'm all for it too! After all, I might not hurt anyone on the ground, but I definitely will have my own skin in the game. The more experienced eyes that I can find to look over my work, the better!

But, as mentioned above, there is a mound of inscrutable forms to be filled out, and it all has to progress in a rigid, immutable order. An airplane is nothing but an expensive and sophisticated piece of abstract sculpture without the requisite paper trail pushing it along through the air. This is why it is important to contact the local FAA guys early in the process.

The easiest way to accomplish that initial contact, at least for someone like me that spends most of the day in front of a computer, is to submit a request via the FAA.gov web site. I did so and received a call from an FAA representative within just a few days. He had me sit down at the computer and winnow out the appropriate forms on the FAA web site and bookmark them for later retrieval. It was all going swimmingly until I made one fatal error: I mentioned that I had attended the required 16 hour training course to receive an inspection authorization and it would be nice to get that paperwork submitted as part of the overall documentation exercise.

"Wait, what?" he asked. "Are you building an LSA?"

"Uh, yeah," I timidly responded, having picked up on the negative vibe.

"Oh, well.... we don't do those. You have to get a DAR for that."

A DAR is a Designated Airworthiness Representative. It is, in less lofty terms, an individual designated to perform tasks too common or onerous for the Feds to deal with. It is very, very common, but mostly in the case of performing private pilot checkrides. It is exceedingly rare to take such a lowly check ride with an actual FAA examiner. Note that I am NOT criticizing this way of doing business with the taxpayer; the designated examiner gets paid by the aspirant, not the taxpayer. I think my most recent flight check cost about $100.

Fair, that.

The thing is, there are only two DARs close enough to come to Grove City, and both would have to drive a goodly distance. For this, they charge in the $600 range.

Not so fair, that.

Que sera, sera, and you can't take it with you. It's only money.

Cold comfort, that, but sufficient to the need, despite the penurious nature of my budget this late into the build.

I had no sooner settled into the idea that I would have to arrange my inspection with a DAR when a different FAA guy called me. It seems that they have decided that it is high time that they learn how to deal with an LSA and that they would use my inspection as a learning event. This isn't as risky as it sounds. They have inspected hundreds of home built planes; it is just the somewhat different paperwork that gives them pause. The conversation went quite well. These guys don't wear the Cloak of Unctuosity one might expect from a Federal employee. In fact, at one point the guy felt that he needed to warn me that he would be inspecting my work with a critical eye and that it was very likely that he would find something that I would need to fix. He encouraged me not to take it personally. I'm not sure why I would take offense at a guy trying to save my life, but I inferred that he had encountered responses like that before.

If I didn't have enough on my mind with all of that going on, I also had to solve a little dilemma of my own making. It's time again for the annual Arts in the Alley, which is a local art/crafts show put on by Grove City. Part of it is a photography competition, and I like to enter. The best I've ever done is an Honorable Mention (which I like to call '4th Place' or 'One Level Better Than A Stick In The Eye'), and that was years ago, back before the competition got so tough. I am allowed three entries but they also have an additional 'In Memory Of' award for photos featuring flowers. I had misunderstood that to be a completely separate category and therefore allowing of a fourth entry. Reading comprehension: lacking. But wait, it gets worse.

So, laboring under my incorrect understanding of the rules, I printed and framed four entries:

When I re-read the rules and realized that I was only allowed three entries, I had a problem: I couldn't decide on which three to enter.

Eh, it could wait. Off to the hangar to do some work.

What??! I have to countersink some rivet holes in my freshly powder-coated panel?? Oh no! What if it chips off the powder-coat?

No worries - it went fine.

Those rivets support a piece of metal that will help support the big 10" Dynon screen. There were others that would hold nutplates in place. Squeezing nutplate rivets is something I have done literally millions of times (with a nod to Joe Biden, who literally loves that word to death!) and I could pretty much autopilot my way through it.

Or..... not. Hey, look! A rivet to nowhere!!

If I was nervous about countersinking a hole in the panel, I was beside myself with worry about drilling out a rivet! It all turned out okay, though.

Back when I was still in the TSA phase of the Skyview conversion, I had to cut the four wires that ran to the autopilot disconnect button in the lower panel. Anxious to never make me take so crass an action ever again, Van's has me install a four-pin Molex connector on the wires to the switch so it can be more easily removed should I ever again need to do so.

I have never crimped a Molex pin, so I was kind of worried about how to do it. Here's what I figured out:

Looks good! What a relief! On to the next task, which is to put the pins into the Molex receptacle.

The other side of the wires, the ones in the airplane, will get Molex connectors crimped on too, but I didn't want to mess around with figuring out how to get them separated.

Instead, I decided to make the 1/2" hole in the lower panel for the switch to fit through. If I was worried about drilling out a rivet... well, how worried was I about using a Uni-Bit, not the suavest tool in the toolbox, to rip open a 1/2" hole?

A lot!

The hole turned out fine, so I went to install the switch.

Oops!

There's no way that connector is going through that hole. Chagrined, I went back to the instructions to see where I went wrong. And there it was, as plain as day: I was supposed to have put that connector on the wires in the plane, not on the switch. That, as you've surely surmised, comes later.

So, now I need to figure out how to get those pins back out of a Molex receptacle. I figured that perhaps I should save that for a later day when my mind might not be so distracted with other problems.

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!

On Letting Go...

There comes a time when you just need to let go. Whether you are a mentor, parent, teacher, or jailer, at some point you will have to step back from those under your guidance or tutelage and allow your protege to make his or her own way through life. And so it is with Van's. At some point, it would seem, they decided to just let us figure things out for ourselves now and then.

At least that's the way I felt about page 42D-20.

I had been putting off this rather intimidating looking page for a few days, hoping that the dry weather that was providing such a fertile ground for the airborne pollen that had my allergies torturing me more than I can ever remember would move aside in favor of an air-cleansing rain.

And so it was that I finally found myself coughing and sniffling a little bit less, but now plagued by the irritations that arise when a young, energetic dog, who has become used to being able to play fetch every day of the week, finds a wet yard blocking his routine play time. Desperate to escape the plaintive whining and ceaseless staring (of the dog, to be specific), I headed out to the hangar.

Here is the task at hand, writ in Sanskrit:

I knew this day of reckoning was going to arrive someday - the hint of complexities to come was delivered with this additional bag of wires labeled 'REV 1' and 'Fix-1'. This bag seems to be an adjunct to the bag that contained a beefy coil of wires labeled 'WH-00026'. The words/word fragments 'REV' and 'Fix' have a special connotation in the lexicon of RV-12 building. They mean that you have fallen squarely in the middle of preceding builders who encountered a problem with the kit and subsequent builders who will receive parts that make no reference to revisions or fixes. While it is better to be in the middle group than it is to be in the first group, it can still cause a bit of anxiety.

Inside the bag was a small wisp of wiring (I hesitate to even call it a 'bundle' or 'harness') and a single, lone, unattached wire. And no more. No explanations, no special directions. Nothing.

So, to the main book of plans to see what is to be done. "Find the WH-RV12-HEADSET wiring harness... and cut off any wire connectors leaving as much wire as possible."

Here they are:

"Crimp the (WHT/BLK) shield wire coming from the WH-RZ194 and WH-RZ195 into one end of a splice. Find the WH-RZ944 (WHT/BLK) wire coming from the WH-00026 Option Conversion Harness...."

Yeah, bit of a problem there. There was no wire coming from the harness in question. I could only assume that the wire in question was the lonely, unattached wire included in the Fix-1 bag. It was starting to become apparent what the problem the early adopters ran into may have been. It would seem that someone had forgotten to install these wires at the factory. For kits that were put together before a manufacturing change could be put in place, Van's just sent along the raw (well, slightly distilled, anyway) materials for us to figure out for ourselves. They were letting go; there would not only be no hand holding on this, there wasn't even to be the whiff of a hint.

That was my theory, anyway.

I opened the back shell of the WH-00026 and sure enough, there was a vacant hole where the Sanskrit drawing showed a BLK/WHT wire.

I went ahead and stuffed the provided wire into the appropriate socket.

I hope.

That just left the mystery of what the WH-RZ194 and WH-RZ195 were. I had a pair of suspects matching the description, but they were travelling under the aliases PILOT and CO-PILOT. I can't think about the subject of aliases without laughing; have you ever filled out a job application where they ask you to provide any current or formerly used aliases? I have, and I always wonder if the designers of the form are fully cognizant of the purpose of an alias. I mean, what was the point of using one in the first place if you're just going to tell the world about it anyway?

But I digress. I was pretty sure that PILOT and CO-PILOT were the guys I was looking for and that their real names were WH-RZ194 and WH-RZ195, but I didn't know which was which. I went looking for help on the internet and was able to find the answer. I recorded it for posterity.

They next mystery was similar: there were ES 320559 and ES 320682 splices referenced on the drawing, but no way to determine which was which in the bag of parts.

I went with a line-up to flush out the identities of the provided splices.

Counting worked.

A great deal of splicing ensued. After the BLK/WHT splices, I had to do GRN/WHT splices. The single GRN/WHT wire was also not installed in a back shell, but it was found attached to a few other wires that also weren't installed in the back shell.

Splices were attached to the PILOT and CO-PILOT bundles.

Matching them up with the Fix-1 wires was easy, but I had to make sure to keep the appropriate matching colors correctly matched to their new mates since there were two of each.

This is where Van's fell silent. I was on my own from here. I decided to clean up the mess of new wires rather than just leave them in a loose bunch. Tie wraps first:

Then I wrapped the whole bundle with the ugly yet functional orange stretchy silicone stuff I remember from back in the day when I was working on SR-71s. The Lockheed guys that built those amazing jets could make those bundles look pretty good; I can't.

Still working under the assumption that I should put the loose ends into the connector, I went ahead and did so. I added separate heat shrink for each bundle to ensure that I would have at least some chance of telling the wires apart and getting them into the correct holes.

Heat shrink shrunk (with heat - that's why it's called 'heat shrink'), the bundle bundled, and tie wraps added for decoration:

I also bundled the two separate bundles together? Why? Because Van's had had enough of my independent thought. They told me to.

I am starting to detect a theme here. A lot of color-coded connectors are gravitating towards this same little area.

I wonder if it has anything to do with this colorful little box still sitting back home on the parts shelf:

I'm sure they will tell be soon enough.

Maybe.

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.

Hot Air

One of my pet peeves (full disclosure: I collect pet peeves in the way lonely widows collect cats) when chained to my desk deep in the bowels of the data mines is interruptions. With my gamut of responsibilities running from IT Director all the way down to dish washer, help desk activities are an essential part of my job, but that makes it no less disruptive when I have to pull myself away from a particularly thorny piece of code to go handle a far more mundane issue. My typical trek across the office to the site of the problem is often accompanied by a muttered "This is why I never get anything done."

Did I say dish washer?? Well, yes, as I think I may have mentioned before, I am almost always the first one to get to the office in the morning. As such, I am the first to come across a packed-to-the-gills dishwasher. It's really up to one of the ladies in our Operations group to empty the dishwasher, but while almost dead, there is still a faint breath of life remaining in my chivalry gene. I usually go ahead and put the dishes away so they won't have to.

It's usually not even 6am when this is happening and since I am the only one there, the office is dead quiet. Disturbingly so, in fact. To the degree that I turn on the TV and put on the VH1 Classic channel. I think "classic" is their way of saying that they actually still play music as opposed to, say, MTV. Anyway, the commercials at the hour are always entertaining. I mostly tune them out, but the other day I heard one in which the narrator was saying, "By age 50, you may have lost up to 50% of your testosterone." I looked over just in time to see a despondent looking fellow sitting on the edge of a bed, accompanied by a woman (presumably wife or very close friend) who was looking somewhat disgusted.

The man said, "Well, that explains a lot!"

I looked over at my partially completed, not-very-manly domestic chore and said, "Yes. Yes it does."

As to not getting things done, though, I am going to provide an example of why building an airplane at the airport is a less than ideal situation when it comes to avoiding distractions. Pete and I typically meet at the McDonalds just up the street from the airport for a quick infusion of grease and caffeine before heading to the hangar. Once at the hangar we usually jump right into our respective jobs, but not this weekend. We first had to spend a goodly amount of time ogling the hot air balloons that were flying over, some of which came over the hangar quite low and landed at the soccer fields out by the airport road.

Oh, this? This is the stupidest cup holder on the face of the planet:

Here are the balloons:

I guess they're pretty in a way, and fun to watch as they try to land, but other than their work as artillery spotters in pre-airplane wars, I've never understood the point of them. If I wanted to be trapped where I couldn't get away from the irritating noise of expelled hot air while losing all control over my personal direction, I'd get married! [rim shot]

Once the novelty of the balloons had worn off, we got to work.

I'm still working on the replacement of the Dynon D-180 wiring with the new Skyview wiring. It's not just the wiring that has changed, though. The two units are configured in very different ways, and that includes the location of the box that samples the pressure in the pitot and static lines to calculate airspeed and altitude. With the D-180, those lines were fed into the back of a box way up in the front of the plane, in the avionics area. With the Skyview, those lines are plugged into a computer installed way back in the tail cone.

So with the old installation, the pitot tube came in through the firewall and stopped in the avionics bay, while the two static lines went through a T fitting into a single tube that ran forward up to the avionics bay.

With the Skyview, the pitot line now needs to go back to the tail cone, and the static lines are already there.

The secret to understanding the next step was to realize that the air that runs through the pitot and static lines really doesn't care what it is being used for; a tube is a tube is a tube. With that in mind, it's perfectly reasonable that the original tube that was carrying static pressure data from back to front will work equally as well as a tube carrying pitot data from front to back. All that has to happen to make that work is to connect the through-firewall tube to the old static tube up in the avionics bay. Now you have one long pitot tube running from the very tip of the front of the plane all the way back to the tail with hardly any effort at all!

There is one other change needed. That long pitot tube is still attached to the two static tubes at the T fitting in back. It needs to be removed.

That leaves two static lines (one on each side of the plane) in a bit of a mess. That's fixed by yanking out the short static line on the left side and replacing it with a longer one. That new longer tube will meet up with the right side tube up in the area where the air data computer will live. The two tubes get put back into the T fitting, and a third tube comes from the T fitting up to the input on the computer. That causes the left and right static pressures to be averaged before going into the computer.

So, two new tubes cut to length, the old static tube yanked out, new static tube cut to length, and another little tiny length of plastic tube that will be used to join the thin static tube to the thicker white tube that will plug into the computer.

This is the T fitting that will average the two static sources into the tube that goes to the computer:

The tubes get heated to make them expand enough to fit onto the nipple of the T fitting. More noisy hot air!!

Taa-daaa! Fits to a T. (So to speak)

This is where the fitting will be tie-wrapped into place once the computer is installed.

It is not a comfortable place to work. That's kind of the hallmark of this latest line of work. Very uncomfortable contortions required.

This is the new left side static line attached to the static port. If you're completely lost as to why all of this pitot and static stuff is going on, you can read up on it here.

The new computer is also going to want a bundle of wires run back to it from the avionics bay. This will allow it to compute digital values based on the pitot and static information and transmit them up front to other computers and to the display unit. The holes that currently (heh - electrical current. Get it?) carry electrical wires through the bottom of the cockpit are already full with other wires, so new holes get drilled to handle the additional wires.

There were measurements provided to correctly position the new hole, but it was hard to get down inside there with a ruler to get a precise location marked.

Another problem was the location of other wires right behind where one of the holes was to be drilled. It's a 3/4" hole, and that means Uni-Bit. And Uni-Bit means long, angry, looking-for-trouble bit. I had to keep those wires out of harm's way. I lassoed them with some twine and yanked them out of the way while I drilled with the other hand. Well, no, that doesn't sound right. I guess I held the wires with one hand and held the drill with the other.

Good thing the markings for the hole location weren't super precise or I'd be all upset with myself for missing the spot so badly.

Back up front, there is a connector on one of the harnesses that was to be plugged into a little external box that did nothing but provide knobs for setting things on the autopilot built into the knob-less D-180. That function is now built into the knob-enabled Skyview, so the connector is no longer needed.

There was also a pair of wires that I had to verify had been installed by Van's. That meant that I had to pop open the back shell of the connector and take a look.

The wires were there, so all I had to do was chop off the old connector and cover the exposed ends of the wires. I covered each individual wire with thin heat shrink tube, then covered the entire bundle with bigger tube. Having plenty of heat shrink tube on hand is really paying off!

There were two big bundles of wire in the avionics bay that had to be long enough to reach the back of the D-180. Rather than have us remove those bundles entirely to be replace with new Skyview bundles, Van's has developed a series of adapter bundles to transition from one system to the other. These adapter bundles will take up a lot of room in the avionics bay and will moot the need for the original bundles to take up so much space in the bay. Therefore, we are instructed to pull them back down into the tunnel and bundle them up. I did the pulling down part, but deferred the bundling up part.

While I was working in the tunnel, I came across a lone, orphaned wire. It is one of the wires that used to be connected to the autopilot disconnect switch. It had to be cut loose since it was hard-wired to a switch in the now obsolete lower instrument panel. I had to refer back to the plans to find out which wire it used to be spliced to, then re-do the splice.

This is why I never get anything done!

Then it was time to install the first adapter bundle, Hmmm, bit of a problem here: male to male threads? That ain't gonna work! At least in the Midwest.

That sent me back to the build manual where I discovered that I had overlooked the part where it said I would have to use gender matchers.

That will work much better!

I couldn't help noticing that these adapter bundles had a hella lot more wire than they needed just to span the 10 inches across the avionics shelf. That did not bode well. That wire was gonna have to go somewhere!

Meanwhile, Pete was drilling a hole in the cooling shroud over the engine. A cooling hose was to be installed to provide cooling air to the expensive-and-failure-prone Ducati voltage regulator/rectifier mounted on the firewall shelf. It was too tight of a fit to get a drill in there, so he had to improvise.

You may remember that I was going to part ways with Van's and not remove the pitot hose, thinking that by removing one of the wire bundles that they would have us abandon in place I would have enough room to push new wires through without removing the pitot tube. Well, I pulled out the wires, compared them to those much thicker bundles still coiled up on the adapter harnesses, and decided to pull out the pitot tube too.  I was quite a bit of wire to leave in place. I'm not sure why they did that. I think I had better hold onto it, just in case....

With those wires pulled out and the connector chopped off, I again had to shrink some tube over the remaining stubs.

Which gave me an idea. I saw that I would be pulling wires through that had little gold pin connectors on them. This was just like the trim motor wires that I had pulled through ages ago when I first did the wiring. I had read case after case of other builders breaking those gold pins off and struggling to replace them. I wrapped mine in masking tape to protect them, and patted myself heartily on my back for successfully pulling them through without breaking a single one. The tape had been a chore to pull through the bushings, though, because I had gotten wrinkles in it. I decided that this time I would try bending the pins back and covering them with heat shrink before trying to pull them through tight, crowded areas.

It worked perfectly!

There was quite a bit of wire to be pulled:

It was a miserable job, but I finally got all of the new wires down through the avionics bay floor, over the rubber pedal bars, and through the first new hole. It's amazing how desperately those wires want to tangle up with each other, tangle up with themselves, and snag on pieces/parts of airplane. Truly a frustrating job, but eventually I was able to sit back and look at a completed task.

I looked too close. There, sitting on the floor of the cockpit, was a little gold plug. All by its little lonesome - nothing attached to it. There was only one place it could have come from: the bundle of trim wires that I had ever so carefully pulled all the way up from the very back of the airplane without breaking one. One must have gotten broken off when it got snagged by one of the new wires.

This, THIS is why I never get anything done!