Installed Baggage Corner Skin & More Wiring

Learning from the right side, when installing the left F-1273 baggage corner skin made life a little easier by removing even more Clecos from the side skin which made installing the closeout much easier. The loser side skin allowed more play and less friction making alignment and positioning no struggle at all.

Positioning the left F-1273 baggage corner skin so it can be slid under the fuselage’s bottom skin.

The left F-1273 baggage corner skin secured in position with Clecos.

After the F-1273 left baggage corner skin was secured with Clecos, looked ahead in the plans and the next step begins installation of the turtle deck components and rear window … which, if installed at this point in time, will make getting into the tail cone even more difficult than it will be otherwise. So will be hit the brakes on placing more metal on the fuselage for the time being and finish up running wires through the center tunnel then fall back and tidy up all the wiring from the tail cone forward with tire ties.

The only remaining wires needing to be pulled in through the center tunnel are the wires from the switches on the stick grips and the canopy latch switch wire. Decided to knock out the WH-W1114 canopy latch switch wire first … this is the wire that runs from Van’s newly added micro switch for the RV-12’s canopy latch forward to the instrument panel. Note: Some documents also refer to this wire as WH-00109, but one of the newer electrical schematic drawing calls this wire WH-W1114, so that is what I’m going with. Because the conduit for the cockpit lighting is already installed inside the roll bar, could not run this wire through that conduit … so a new conduit was made for the wire by cutting a 30" piece of 1/8" vinyl fuel line to pass through the roll bar. Next the WH-W1114 canopy latch switch wire was run through the center channel wiring conduit and up through the center tunnel to the instrument panel. According to the electrical drawing, at the instrument panel the WH-W1114 canopy latch switch wire will attach to pin 8 of the 37 pin d-sub connector labeled “Fuselage” on the WH-00046 wiring harness.

Feeding the WH-W1114 canopy latch switch wire through the center channel wiring conduit.

The only remaining wires left to run up the center tunnel to the instrument panel are the wires for the switches on the control sticks.  So that will be the focus of the next work session.