Friday, November 8, 2024

Left Wing Terminal Block

No exciting photos, but after hours and hours of planning I'm ready to get going on some more wiring.  I don't have a perfect plan for how everything will be routed yet, mostly because the size of the eventual wire bundles will dictate that to a certain degree.  The wiring from the wings will come in through the side skins and end at a terminal block under the seats (the outside rib bays will be where the comm antennas are).  Some people run continuous wiring from the wings to the panel, but doing that would mean I'd be stuck not being able to finish wiring until the wings are on for good.  Putting in terminal blocks means I can run all of the fuselage wiring and be done with it, then just connect the wire from the wings once they are attached.

I'm probably going to have to drill some new wire holes through the seat ribs.  The holes that I drilled in the front of the ribs per the plans won't really work because the brackets for the control sticks are right in that path.  I have no idea why the plans have you drill in that location.


I measured the route from the terminal block, up through the center tunnel and up to the subpanel.  About 9' of wire should give me plenty of length for the left side.  I labeled all of the left wing wiring and crimped on ring terminals for the terminal block.  I'm going to wait on attaching the dsub and labels on the other end until I have most of the other fuselage wiring routed so I can cut it all to the final length.  I need to lay out where the ACM module will go on the subpanel so I can figure out how much of a loop to leave in the wire bundles.