Not much visible progress on the Savannah today but my time on it was actually very well spent. I need to get ready to replace the cabin top panel. The wiring to the switch panel in the cabin roof is only readily accessible when the roof panel is removed and as this isn’t something that you want to do unless it’s absolutely essential, now’s the time for me to deal with any wiring changes and problems.<\/p>\n
And I’ve already noticed a few of the latter. There was a disconnected blue wire with masking tape around its bare end and a join to what I suspected is the main positive feed to the switch panel also ‘insulated’ with masking tape. And that’s before even thinking about what changes I’ll need to make to fit a set of working strobes.<\/p>\n
Insulating any electrical connection with masking tape is a big NO-NO! The main reason is that it’s just not durable enough – basically it’s just made out of paper and when it chafes, which it can do very easily on any kind of moving vehicle, it rubs away to expose the wire beneath. Then if you’re lucky you pop a fuse or a contact breaker, if you’re not you get an electrical fire, so you only ever use masking tape for what it’s intended for and NEVER to insulate electrical connections.<\/p>\n
I started by seeing what was going on with the existing strobe system. I soon found out that the cables from each wing strobe dropped down into the back of the cabin, together with the blue wire that had been cut. The Savannah has an access panel in the bottom of the fuselage behind the cabin and when I removed that, I found out what was going on.<\/p>\n
There evidently used to be a heavy, old-technology strobe box mounted down there because the wires from each tip strobe were just dangling in the space and the blue wire had obviously once been its power supply. So that solved that one. As the strobes that I intend to fit each just require three cables (power, earth and a synchronising connection cable between the two units) which the existing strobes already have, all I had to do today was remove the cabling that will no longer be required which thankfully included the blue wire ‘up top’ with its end bound in masking tape.<\/p>\n
Then I turned my attention to the wiring into and out of the switch panel. Quite frankly, it’s appalling and whoever was responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves. Sure enough, the masking tape bound joint does become live when the master is switched on, so I’ll have to deal with that. Also, the panel itself is scrappy and its wiring a confused cat’s cradle, so that’ll all need to be sorted out as well as the connections ready for the new strobes when I eventually fit them.<\/p>\n
I’ll be much happier when I know that the cabling is up to standard and luckily it’s something that I’m pretty good at and enjoy doing. I’ll also have to make up a new switch panel front as seeing how badly the current one has been thrown together and how difficult it is to remove to get access to the switches mounted on it, I’d never be able to sleep if I left it as it is \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not much visible progress on the Savannah today but my time on it was actually very well spent. I need to get ready to replace the cabin top panel. The wiring to the switch panel in the cabin roof is only readily accessible when the roof panel is removed and as this isn’t something that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12347"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12356,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12347\/revisions\/12356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}