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.

My ELT showed up yesterday from Gulf Coast Avionics.  I drilled the mounting plate to the shelf and installed nutplates so the mounting plate can be removed in the future if necessary.  There are three connections necessary for the ELT: a telephone cable that connects the ELT to the audio alert box and remote interface, an insulated four-conductor wire for power, ground, and GPS serial input, and the antenna cable.

I connected the telephone wire and snaked the other end through the conduit and up behind the panel.  I had to cut the RJ12 connector off of the end so that it would fit through the conduit, but that just gave me an excuse to buy another tool so that I could crimp a new connector on the other end after I was done :-).  Even if I hadn’t needed to cut the end off to route the wire, I would probably have done so anyway so that I can make the wire the exact length necessary instead of coiling up the extra wire.

I received an order from Aircraft Spruce today with some three conductor shielded wire, so I attached it to the female mini din connector.  This is really a stupid connector to use.  The solder cups are way too small even for 24AWG wire, but I eventually got everything soldered together and used some shrink tubing to stabilize the wires.  The connector is then filled with E6000 to further stabilize the wires and the sleeve is slipped over it.  The other issue with this connector is that it doesn’t positively lock together, so it can vibrate loose.  ACK’s instruction manual says to use some tape to keep the two halves together which is a little cheesy.  The extra wire coming out of the connector is used during installation to monitor the signal received from the GPS.

I then ran the shielded wire up to the front of the cabin.  I still need to secure the wires in this area, but that will have to wait until I rivet this shelf in place.