![\"null\"](\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/panelwk3.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBy this time, the panel itself was looking in a bit of a sorry state as the following pictures show.<\/p>\n But what concerned me most of all was what was behind it. I was already expecting the worst after initially seeing the dog’s dinner of cables and connections when I first dropped the cable down the other day but it was what I saw when I looked a bit more closely that really alarmed me. See below.<\/p>\n It’s the number of cut cables that there are with open ends many of which can clearly be seen above. I originally wanted to make up a new panel because of the appearance of the old one, but now I’ve seen the back of the old one, it’s obvious that it would have needed to be re-wired quite urgently anyway. And that’s not all. I’ve spent most of today with the old panel in front of me on the bench working out what’s connected to what and getting an idea how I’ll re-do it. Something rather important has struck me. UK X-Airs are wired up with a master key switch which controls everything electrical. This is then connected to an aux switch through which a radio interface, an external power socket and, most importantly, the starter button are run. This means that without the key being in and turned, the starter is inactive.<\/p>\n My French X-Air doesn’t have a starter button. Instead there’s a key switch that operates the starter. There’s a master switch but that only switches power through to the water temperature and engine hours gauges and also a ruddy great electrical filter (the large black box in the picture above) that I’ve taken out and will be discarding. The master switch becomes active when the key is turned – but so does the starter, so the starter can operate independently of the master switch on the turn of the key. And this means that if the mags are on, the engine will start on the key with the master switch turned off.<\/p>\n This is a completely unacceptable state of affairs. MYRO had a conventional aircraft mags\/starter rotary key switch and when I re-wired its panel, I made the master switch a proper master so nothing was live, including the starter, until it was switched on. I’ll be doing a similar arrangement for the X-Air, the difference being that this time the mag switches will be separate from the starter switch. The problem with having separate mag switches is having some kind of arrangement so the engine can’t be started by swinging the prop. I have to admit that I haven’t got around to solving that one yet and it may not be possible without having the kind of switch that MYRO had. Mind you, the same applies to all UK X-Airs too, so maybe it’s really not worth bothering about \ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n By the way, I had company while I was doing the work outside yesterday to remove the panel. Mind you, he wasn’t very much of a help, as the picture below shows, sleeping on the job most of the time.<\/p>\n As is usual at the moment, yesterday started off a bit chilly and dull but as it brightened up by lunch time, I was able to get on as planned with the X-Air panel work. To start off with, I had to remove items I didn’t want to keep, such as the intercom\/radio interface together … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4421","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\/4421","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=4421"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4440,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4421\/revisions\/4440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"