My order for my firewall forward parts is still not here. It's still just listed on Van's site as "preparing for shipment," which it's been for 3 weeks now. I guess it's safe to say they still haven't gotten their operations under control.
I wasn't going to do any more work on wiring until after the firewall work was largely complete, but I'm tired of twiddling my thumbs. I'm going to go ahead and figure out the wire routing and terminations for all of the wiring that I ran up to the front of the plane before. I won't be able to finish it completely until I actually have the panel instruments to work around, but hopefully I can get some of the main runs done to the ACM.
The biggest hurdle so far is the 90 degree turn from the floor and up the firewall. The wire bundles are so large that they don't make the turn, as well as then curl over the vertical stiffener to make the run upwards, all while staying compact enough at the floor to let the center tunnel cover lay flat. That cover is the kicker. It was designed 25 years ago when there was probably half the wiring that there is today. The space allotted for the wiring and brake/fuel lines is just very tight. I tried using conduit vs the wire wrap (the wire wrap makes the bundles really stiff), but it still doesn't work very well. I may have to split the bundles in two to make the diameters smaller until they are running up the firewall stiffener. The left side wires used to run over the top of the brake lines, but I couldn't get that to work, so I pulled it all out and reran the wire behind the brake lines. I think that will work better, but I am still having issues getting the wiring to comply and go where it needs to. This whole area feels like a design afterthought. I spent a few hours messing around with it, but had to give up for the day and do something else.
Once the wire bundles reach the top of the firewall, I'll route them back to the subpanel. I added a few adel clamps to the firewall stiffener, wire support bar and the bottom of the subpanel. A lot of people drill holes in the subpanels for the wire to pass through, but not having the panel instruments yet, I didn't want to do that. The GPS will require a big cutout in the subpanel, and there are still a few items to mount to the subpanel. It's going to be tight, and I don't want to make wiring holes that then end up being in the way. To get around that, I decided to run most of the wire along the bottom of the subpanel. There will be a few wires that I do run through holes in the subpanel, but I'll wait to do those until all the instruments are in place.
Both the left and right wire bundles follow the same general path to the subpanel. Since the ACM is on the left though, a bunch of wires from the right bundle will have to split off and travel along the bottom of the subpanel to the right side and join wires in the other bundle. I put some adel clamps in place for that as well. The way the ACM works, I will be combining wires from the left and right into single bundles to go into a specific D-Sub connector at the ACM. So now the game is figuring out what the "right" length of the wires is, terminating them, labeling, etc.
