Another day

And this is how it started at dawn this morning. I woke up early, couldn’t get back to sleep and got up. And I’m glad I did because otherwise I’d have missed these gorgeous images of the sun just beginning to peep over the horizon. This was the view over the fields and mist-filled valleys in front of my house.

But after I’d got today’s chores out of the way, the day’s main task was to make a start on stripping out the Savannah’s instrument panel ready for its planned upgrade. The first shot was taken after I’d disconnected the choke cable.

The next shot was taken as I’d just started to pull the panel front forward having removed all of it’s fixings, the choke cable and the two throttle actuation rods.

The next three shots were taken from left to right as I began to pull the panel front further out. I was already seeing signs of trouble that were not wholly unexpected after my previous experiences with the Savannah’s wiring. I’ll come back to them in a moment but I’m super glad that I’ll be able to bring all of the behind-panel wiring up to the standard that I’ll be satisfied with.

The next shot is of the left hand side of the panel after I’d removed the trim and mag switches and the master key switch.

And here’s a shot showing the signs of trouble that I mentioned above.

At (1) you can see two bare connections of the 12V power supply cables for the electric turn indicator. As I found when I rewired the cabin overhead switch panel, whoever did the work was quite happy to make cable connections, in this case by soldering, and then just wrap them with insulating tape.

The trouble with that is clearly shown in the image. Over time the insulating tape’s adhesive dries out and the tape drops off, leaving the connections bare. If they had touched while live they would have shorted out with a real risk of causing a fire. Imagine that happening at 3000 feet over water or hostile terrain. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

But that’s not all. At (2) you can see some bare cut wire ends. These happen to be connected to the unused side of a 4-pole switch that has been used to power the electric turn indicator on and off. I don’t know if they are live or not but it doesn’t matter, you just don’t leave bare ends swinging in the wind like that.

Thank gooodness I’ll be able to deal with both of these issues, plus any others that I find during my panel upgrade. That’s as far as I got today because today’s efforts were mainly exploratory to find out what will be involved in removing the panel completely. Now I know I’ll be able hopefully to complete the job tomorrow when I will have all the items that I will need to hand.