October 11, 2006

I managed to get out a little early yesterday and today and stopped by the hangar. Yesterday, I didn’t really do plane work, I spent most of my time cleaning up and getting the place in some sort of order. It’s starting to look a little better now. At the weekend, I’ll take a broom and sweep the place out even.

This evening, I riveted the camlocks onto the upper strips around the top of the firewall. Now I can move on and get the cowl fitted finally. It does fit already, but I only had it assembled with clecos previously.

I also climbed inside again, and got under the panel to mount the interior footwell lights and secure the fuel vent lines with Adel clamps. It wasn’t really too bad under there! While I was doing lighting stuff, I finished up wiring the map lights. Here is a ’night’ shot in the dark hangar. The footwells illuminate nicely, along with the baggage compartment. I did this to make it more ‘car like’. On the panel, there’s an interior light switch which is connected to the battery bus, so they can be switched on at any time, and left on to flatten the battery. I wonder how many times that will happen!

The red glow you can see on the panel is the light from the LED map lights. The light form these is enough to illuminate the panel too when you’re flying. Sweet. The only things I have to do under ther now is fit the ducting for the air vents and mount the fire extinguisher to the front of the centre console.