3 hours.
Ugh.. I hate being sick, especially if it’s on a weekend. The previous weekend was Dave’s (yes, the Dave appearing in this blog) birthday. His 40th. So a gaggle of us went to a rented karaoke room, drank sake, sang songs and ate sushi. We did this until they kicked us out around midnight or so, then we all went back to Dave’s and the revelry continued until 4am or so. Epic, awesome, amazing weekend. Paid for it this weekend with an unbelievably bad cold and fever. It started Wednesday afternoon and I was flattened until yesterday. I managed to get a little bit of work done, but not much.
Here we have the EFIS and the radios all in their trays, switches in position. I’m going to have to replace the battery master with an on-off switch instead of the one that’s in there, because I have no plans to kill my alternator field in flight or otherwise. Killing the alt field shortens the life of the alternator by hundreds of hours, so buggerit, I’m doing it differently. If the battery master is off, the alt field is off. That’s it. I also have the EFIS backup battery swictch and the warning light, which gets hooked up to the EFIS, which will theoretically warn me about things that are, uh, interesting.
Next step was to mount this whole bastardly collection on board. The hole in the subpanel, carefully measured, should accommodate the end of the GNS 430.
OK, fine, but It looks like my measurement was off. I had to cut another half inch of metal off the hole at the bottom otherwise the panel wouldn’t sit right against the remaining support rib.
No big thing. Once that was all set up, I could solidify the radio stack by riveting a couple of ears onto the GNS430 tray and bolting them to the subpanel. I also made some angle brackets to support the transponder by tying it to the audio panel, which is on top of the GNS430. None of this is going anywhere. I could stand on this setup and it wouldn’t budge.
Test fit-up looks good, not hard to screw the panel back on, and everything is rock solid.
I’m thinking about doing a couple of angles on the back side of the subpanel where the ears on the 430 are. This will spread out the load even more, plus it’ll give me some beef to put on a couple of platenuts for the ears instead of just using hex nuts. As it is though, I was able to fit all the components in and lock them down, then get them back out again, which means that I got my geometry right when I set it all up on the bench.
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