Clearing the logjam

At last! I’ve been tracking the Savannah’s radio wiring loom on it’s way to me from England and this morning it said that it had arrived at its distribution depot in France. No mention of it being available locally for delivery or whatever, so I was surprised when at 10.30am this morning it popped into my post box!

But not being one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, I grabbed it and began to make plans to start installing it. The first thing that I’ll need is a pair of dual-hole mounting brackets for the new headsets, so I set about making those straight away from some of the left-over aluminium sheet from the panel work. Here’s a shot of my initial attempt.

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I had to actually have two bites at the cherry, however, because I’d forgotten that the old ones, that I hadn’t removed at that point, were on little extension pieces to lower them below the dash and to bring them backwards a bit into the cabin. Here’s how I modified them this evening ready to install tomorrow, as it was too late to return to Malbec by the time I’d finished.

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But that wasn’t the only time that I went off a bit half-cocked today. I was half-way to Malbec just after lunchtime and thinking about the wiring loom when it occurred to me whether or not they had shorted pin 12 in its D-plug to earth as it will need to be in my arrangement. The D-plug that I’d bought to solder myself was already shorted but as the wiring loom allows the option of an external intercom, which requires the pin NOT to be shorted, my guess was that it wasn’t.

But I hadn’t checked, so I had to stop, turn around and return home again to do so. And lucky I did. The pin wasn’t shorted but instead they’d added a little external switch between it and its earth wire to allow the option of shorting it or not.

I wasn’t at all keen on that arrangement and as I’ll not need the option, I cut the switch off and permanently soldered the wire ends together. Actually, this wasn’t as neat as my D-plug in which the shorting was done internally, but no matter as the wires are of very small diameter and there are another couple in the loom that I won’t need with which they can be bundled together and ‘lost’ behind the panel.

So that was it for today, a start but not much more. Wim and I were going to go flying in the Weedhoppers tomorrow but sadly, I decided to put that off despite having hardly flown this year. After all this time, I couldn’t concentrate on flying knowing that the wiring loom was all ready and waiting to be installed and that I was doing something else and not actually doing it 😐