Tail Fairing and Wing Connectors

I got a bit sloppy with updating the blog but I did get some work done, despite not telling you until now.
I have to admit though that working outside with the high humidity and the usual high temperatures over 100F does make it very hard to maintain a good pace. A few hours feel like I spent all day outside.

So on Friday night, I took off the vertical stabilizer and rudder assembly to get better access to the rivet holes in the tail skins.

In order to secure the rudder cables I connected them with a piece of safety wire.

Now I could get at that rivet holes and I started riveting the nutplates onto the tail skins, to which the fairing halves will eventually connect to.
I used the manual squeezer for this delicate job as I wasn't sure if I could get a good flat seating done with the heavy pneumatic squeezer. The heavy weight reduces the tactile feedback and just provides no feel as to how flat the die sits before squeezing. The manual is much better at that.
The first run was quickly done.

And the second one was even quicker done.

Without the rudder assembly the plane looks like nothing that could fly soon. That's a bit disheartening but fortunately I know better.

That ended Friday night.

On Saturday morning, I decided to continue Section 40, the lighting installation. One of the open tasks was to install the HAL9000 simulation in the cockpit. For the not so cineastic ones among my readers, this describes a red-light camera eye. Well, Van's didn't provide a camera feature but it definitely qualifies as a red-light eye.
I almost didn't want to install it as the light it creates is so faint that you could hardly find your panel if you wouldn't know it's there in the dark. To stay more ELSA compliant, I decided to install it for now before considering getting something that could actually help to read a map if needed.

So I ran the wire pair through the rollbar. I actually ran a thin wire, starting on the top running it down, and then connected the pair to the guide wire with duct tape (cutting off the excess as the hole is pretty small). Then I pulled the pair with the guide wire through the rollbar and through the hole on the top. The bushing was pulled out but as it is a snap bushing it snapped right back in.

Had I read the instructions better I wouldn't have had to this task 3 times before being satisfied.
The part I missed was that they wanted me to not just run the wire pair though but also a 1/4 OD plastic tube to protect the wires from chafing. The other time I had to redo it was owed to me not caring about the routing of the wires below the rollbar plane. It is actually much more reasonable to route the wires BEHIND the ELT frame instead of in front of it.
Once I did it all correct, the back of the rollbar structure looked like this.

Finally I could install the actual light feature.

The riveting was quickly done and I also added some RTV on the back of it to hold the splice connectors in place. The clamp is actually doing this in the picture while the RTV is curing.

That concluded the activities on Saturday and today I was focusing on the electrical wing connectors, aka Section 31A.

I had never installed the flimsy connectors that Van's had come up with initially. I assembled them but decided that I would use trailer light connectors in lieu of a better connectivity solution.
Well, Van's came up with something better than that and after a lot of studying I decided to do the change to the new connectors. For now, I decided not to do a big wire retrofit of the wings, so I won't install separate wires for running the Nav lights without the strobes and I will also not install the sync wire to keep the strobes synchronized over a long period of time.
This is all extra weight and a lot of work at this stage but I do not see the necessity or even a real benefit. I might change my mind later when flying but I seriously doubt it.
I started by removing the old connector plates and marking which part of the connector has what reference number. Trust me, this gets confusing quickly as Van's did not do the installation as you might expect.

Then I installed the capacitor on the left side wiring. This ensures that you're not cutting off a spade connector that you actually needed. The plans do not do this in this order.

Then I cut off the spade connectors from the Stall Warning and the Ground wires and crimped on the new connectors onto the Ground, Stall Warning and the new Nav light wires.

Onto the right side. This was easier as there were no spade connectors that were still needed, so all the old connectors were replaced by new ones.

Then I inserted the connectors into the new plug for the right side.Watch out!
The plugs are different on each side. The right side wants the plug that has the thick plastic pins sticking out, whence it's called a male connector.

The same happened on the left side, only the plug is a female one which has the metal bushings that allow it to float.

Time for drilling the seat pan in the cockpit. Again, Van's provided a template that uses existing rivet heads to position it.

The HF angle drill is just a bit too deep for one of the 4 holes. I drilled 3 holes and clecoed in between. For the 4th hole I used my close quarter angle drill and I opened up all the holes to #19 with that drill as well.

I vacuumed the interior of the gills to remove the debris from the drilling (and a lot of dust from just sitting around) and then went on to prep the angles that would hold the connectors in place.
The top 4 holes that connect the angle to the seat pan needed tapping in 8-32.

The wires on the left side needed to get tamed with some cable ties and then the angle went on.

When installing those angles be careful again. Look at the connectors, they can be rotated and present a different connection pattern if you do. Each connector has a female and a male section on its face. The male section should always be below the female section. Here are the pictures, left side:

... and the right side:

The next steps will be to close up the openings on each side and to install a snap bushing on the left side where I will run the AOA tube through. Then I will work on the wing connectors.