Yesterday, in an effort to put off working in
the cold shop for one more day, decided to spend a little time with the
electrical schematic and draw in the wiring for the landing light to be
installed in the left wing along with adding a couple of tables identifying the
wires for the AeroLESs landing and nav/strobe lights. It will be time well
spent.
While perusing the schematic, decided to break out the label printer and
make a bunch of heat shrink wire labels in advance. Of course, some wires have
the same wire run number, but appear in multiple places. One such example: The
strobe sync wire is the same wire number in both wings and the fuselage. Being
lazy, I thought since I’ve already typed the wire name into the label maker,
may as well print out heat shrink labels for all the termination points while
the wire run name is in the label maker. Saves time retyping all the names
later … great idea in theory! However, I
ran out of heat shrink tubing before getting all the wire runs needed for the
left wing printed out … and I did not have a spare cartridge because I was not
sure how well the Dymo label maker would work on heat shrink tubing, so only
purchased one cartridge the first place.
BRILLANT, ... JUST BRILLANT!!!!
To my defense, I knew the standard label
cartridge contained around 18 feet of vinyl labeling material. So it never
occurred to me that the heat shrink cartridge has ONLY 5 feet of heat shrink
tubing in it! Oh well, more is on order and should arrive Tuesday. In the mean
time I can still run the wires through the wing rib wire grommets.
Speaking of
wire grommets, test fitted the wiring with the larger 437-5 grommets that will
be used on the innermost ribs passing the Tygon tubing. Happy to report there
is plenty of room for both the shielded cables running to the landing light and
nav/strobe light, along with the Tygon AOA tube plus the wire for the
stall-warning indicator. There is no hint of binding or excessive friction and
plenty of room for additional non-shielded wires. Once the temperatures get UP
to 33 degrees (today’s predicted high), plan on trying to make a little
progress in the shop by enlarging the rib grommet holes to 7/16” for those ribs
which will have the Tygon tubing passing through them and snapping the 437-5
grommets in place and running some wire through the grommets.