I received my capacitive fuel senders from Princeton Electronics.  They don’t have a website, but you can reach them at (616) 243-8800.  They have both 2 level and 5 level senders.  Both convert the capacitance range from 0-5 volts, but the 2S model only has calibration points for empty and full.  The 5S model has three intermediate points which is important if you want a linear movement on an analog gauge.  Since I’m using the SkyView which has numerous intermediate calibration points, it doesn’t matter if the sender is linear or not, so I’m just using the 2S sender.  I cut most of the wires off and installed some four position molex connectors on each sender so that they can be easily removed if necessary (well, except for the cable with the BNC connector).

I installed the senders on the aft side of the subpanel since they need to be accessed during calibration.  This is the left sender.

The right one is in the same relative position.

The cable to the fuel tank will get routed down the vent line, but I’m leaving it loose for now until I nail down the overall routing.

I drilled 1/4″ holes just above the vent bulkhead fitting and ran the cable with the BNC connector out through it.  This will get connected to the BNC fitting on the fuel tank which is wired up to the capacitive plates inside the tank.

I finished up the fuel sender wiring by running some wires from the other side of the molex connector.  The red and black wires go to power (VP-X) and ground respectively.  The striped wire is the included wire from the EMS running directly from the necessary pin.

I’m using a single pin on the VP-X (J8 connector) to power both senders.  The wire comes out of the connector and through the adel clamp on the right.  I then used a solder sleeve to split this wire into two: one that runs directly forward to the left fuel sender and one that goes through the left adel clamp and across the plane to the right fuel sender.

I grounded the two fuel senders as well as both SkyView screens (the two twisted pairs of the wires).  I’m down to 11 available spots on my grounding block which seems pretty tight.

I was down to just a handful of unconnected wires on the EMS, so I decided to finish that off tonight.  Two of the wires ran to the fuel senders.  One more ran over to the annunciator control circuit (not connected yet).  Another ran forward and will connect to the left ignition switch to get an RPM reading from the magneto.  Finally, I hooked up the low voltage RPM pins to the Lightspeed Ignition to get a second RPM source.

Here’s a closeup of the Lightspeed Tach line coming into the DB-37 connector.  It’s a shielded 22AWG wire.  I split the shielding out and put heat shrink over it and the split point and wired the center conductor to pin 35 and the shield to pin 16.

I received some interior lights from pilotlights.net.  They were great to work with and even through in a couple of small bonus products with my order.  I’m trying to use all dual color (white/green) interior lights.  From the research I’ve done, everyone is moving away from the old standard of red for cockpit lighting at night.  Although it did fine at preserving your night vision, it makes reading maps really hard.  The military has moved to green, but research has shown that a really dim white light is actually best for preserving night vision while still giving you the best visual clarity.

Here’s the LED light strip I’m going to use under the glareshield (this is the 12V, high-power, dual-color white/green strip).  This is with just the white LEDs illuminated at full power.  It’s hard to capture with a camera, but this is definitely more light than you’d need in a cockpit.

Here it is with just the green LEDs illuminated.

And here it is with both (although I’m not going to wire it in the plane with the ability to light both colors at the same time).

Using one of the PWM dimmers (also from pilotlights.net), you can dim the light down pretty far, but not quite far enough.  A dropping resistor of 150? or so makes the range just about perfect.  You can dim almost down to off and the brightest setting is still plenty bright.

Here’s the PWM dimmer I’m using.  I bought three of these to replace the ones I purchased from periheliondesign.com.  The more I played with those, the less I liked them.  The lights flickered as you ramped up and down through the brightness range and putting the resistors to cap the low and high voltages wouldn’t expand the range of the dimming knob which means you would have to turn the knob a bit before it would come off the low dim setting and you’d hit the bright setting long before hitting the upper end of the knob’s range.  These PWM dimmers ramp smoothly across the whole range of the knob.  They also come with a much nicer machined aluminum knob instead of the plastic one on the dimmer from periheliondesign.com.

I also picked up this little four LED white light.  I’m going to put a dropping resistor on this and use it to cast a very dim light in the footwell.

I also went ahead and hooked up the four SkyView power wires to various pins on J10 and J12.  Each SkyView has one power wire going to bank A and one going to bank B for redundancy.

I’m working quite a lot of hours at work now, so I’m not getting much time on the plane, but I want to make some progress on the plane every day that I can.  Since I got the flaps wired up last night, I decided to wire up the flap position sensor tonight.  These will be the last wires that need to run down the center tunnel.  I installed a three position molex connector for the position sensor.  I’m still not sure how I’m going to anchor these to the rear cover.

I didn’t want the wires from the position sensor to rub the screws that attach the side covers to the flap housing, so I used a small drop of E6000 to secure the wires to the side of the position sensor.

I also swapped out the four position molex connectors on the fuel senders for three position connectors.

I attached the two flap wires to J12, pins 5 and 6 (the lower left red and black wires).

And the three flap position sensor wires to J1, pins 17, 18, and 19.

I ran the wires to the flap motor tonight.  I put a two position molex connector on the wires so that the motor can be easily disconnected if it needs to come out.  There will also be a second connector here for the three pins from the flap position sensor.

I cut away a chunk of the forward end of the aft tunnel cover (basically the part that will be inside the flap motor housing.

This lets the wire that runs down the flap tunnel pass through the rear spar before coming up behind the flap weldment.  All of this will be secured by some wire tie mounts to keep it from coming in contact with the weldment.

I spent most of the day working, but I had a little time so I snuck out to the garage for a bit. I cleaned up some of the wire runs and installed the wire from the starter contactor to the VP-X so that I’ll get a “starter engaged” annunciation on the EFIS.

I put a 1kΩ resistor inline with the wire.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see the note that this was to protect the wire and should be close to the contactor, so I’ll have to replace this wire.