May 3, 2004

I finally took a photo of the baggage illumination. It’s pretty bright. The small hangar lights were actually on in this shot. I turned all the flourescents off. I have two lights the same up front illuminating the foot wells. They’re basically automotive dome lamp bulbs with a bayonet fitting (so they never come loose). Simple and effective.

Maybe I should’ve taken this one with the lamps off! Still, you can just about see what’s going on. I’m going to stick some reflective aluminium under there too.

Now that at least one of the sticks is fully wired, I decided to take a break from it and get the flap positioning system set up. This was really screwy too. I followed the directions to the letter, and for some reason the positions stops all worked when the flaps were on their way up instead of down! Everything went the right way according to whichever way you pushed the switch, it just seemed to be sensing wrong. I talked to Mike, and he had the same problem. I ended up reversing both the motor power wires AND the switch wires! Now it works perfectly, and I’m quite pleased with the result. Hit the switch once and it stops at the next flap angle. Perfect.

I finally assembled this stuff permanently, and safety-wired it. In this picture, I haven’t tightened the nut yet… The safety wire can be seen sticking out near the flap control arm. This is the first thing I’ve had to safety wire with the safety wire pliers! In the past, I’ve safety wired stuff with regular pliers. So slow! I wish I’d had some of these pliers back then!

One of the Infinity stick grips. Excellent quality, with nice tactile switches. A lot of fun to assemble to the stick though! You have to juggle A LOT of wires and switches until you can get both halves together!