Plumbed Up

With another day off from work after Independence Day, I used the cooler (or better: not so hot) mornings to continue work on my RV12.

First I replaced the plastic lock nuts on the throttle cables with ones from metal - MS21042-3 to be precise. This is the better lock nut in hot environments and the engine compartment is certainly such an environment.

Then I had to reroute the flex hose that runs fresh air to the voltage regulator. As you can see the way I had routed the hose before, prevented the air filter from sliding on.

Routing the hose so it would run under the water hose in this critical area did the trick.

While working on that water hose, I noticed a possible chafing area between the hose and the forward motor mount as it touch it. I put a cushion in form of a leftover piece of that water hose over the motor mount and tied it down.

Then I safety-wired both air filters.

Considering how tight it is around those air filters, there is literally no way how they could ever fall off and away from the aircraft but it's easier to do now than during certification when they might require you to do it anyway.

So, finally I felt like the engine compartment was good enough to be left alone for a while. The next step was to open up the avionics cover and finish the plumbing of the Pitot line and some fixes to the wiring.

Thanks to the Stein quick connectors, the plumbing was quickly done - including the splits for the hook-up of the additional steam gauges that I will add after certification.

This is the T for the static line which will run to the ALT and ASI instruments

This T is for the Pitot line that runs back to the ADAHRS and the ASI

The open ends are plugged for now and both pneumatic systems should be ready for testing now.

In this VAF article I had learned that there was a wire missing between the Garmin radio and the AV-50000 black box that made it impossible for the SkyView system to read the currently selected frequency from the radio. The rest of the wiring between the black box and the SkyView system was in place however, so it appeared that adding the missing wire should fix this little "problem".
It is indeed a bit tricky to add that wire as space is extremely limited but others had tried to use a pair of needle nose pliers and succeeded without removing the radio tray.
So I followed those tracks to do the same.

With the help of a small mirror and my smallest needle nose pliers I was able to insert the female socket into the plug (pin 3, red wire is pin 1) without removing the tray.

The question now just is, if I used the correct size socket. I used one that is for male .040" D-sub pins which is on the other end of this wire and hooks up to the AV-50000's COM/NAV port (pin 6, red wire indicates pin 1). I put this wire together from two cut off pieces from harnesses that were not used anymore. So the wire that is yellow on the radio side turns white/orange on the AV-50000 side.

I was even able, after years of pulling my joints out of their sockets working in all the tight spots on the plane, to figure a way to get a couple of tie-wraps installed to secure the wire behind the radio tray.

By then it was approaching noon and the temps their usual uncomfortable level of 100 or more and I decided to seek shelter from this searing heat inside.

I think the additional antenna installations might be next. At least the small ones for the ADS-B receiver and the PCAS. I might leave the APRS one off for now as it is really large and very visible.