The miscellaneous accomplishments of the night:
I don't like that the backup latch at the top of the canopy swings under the roll bar and doesn't have any barrier to keep it from banging against the paint. Since this is just a backup up catch to keep the canopy from lifting if the main hooks fail, I thought about just setting it up so it didn't touch the roll bar at all in normal use (although if the canopy does try to depart, I don't really care if the latch destroys my paint keeping everything in place!). I can see myself accidentally swinging the latch around before the cockpit is fully seated though, and in that case it would gouge the roll bar pretty good. So I dropped the latch down about 1/8" below the roll bar height and installed a strip of UHMW on the aft roll bar channel. This at least gives me a little protection.
Next up was installing the Aithre CO detector. It's a super lightweight box that can go anywhere in the cabin. At first I was looking for a place to bolt it, but it's so lightweight that I decided a strip of adhesive velcro was plenty (and in turns out, that's an option in the install instructions). I put velcro on the cross bar forward of the subpanel and slapped it in place. I actually prefer this approach because for anything hidden by the subpanel, maintenance involves crawling underneath the panel. If the CO monitor has to be taken out, it's going to be far easier to just pull it off the velcro than contort myself to undo nuts and screws.
I spliced the power, ground and data wires onto longer pieces and ran them up to the Backup EFIS Dsub connector on the ACM. Getting to the ACM connectors is easier said than done with all of the wires in place now, so I took the easy way out and just removed the PFD screen. That gives easy access to working behind the panel.
Once it was all wired up, I configured the MFD for the monitor (serial port 2 on the MFD) and set some basic alert levels. Anything in the caution or danger levels will have alerts that show on the screens, as well as provide audible warnings.
I believe that's actually the last bit of wiring that has to be done behind the panel itself! There's still all of the engine sensor wiring, but that's already in place and is just a matter of cutting wires to length on the engine side and connecting to the sensors.
Now comes the part I've been dreading...working on the cowling. I made the first cut on the top cowl to cut it to length so the fit is fairly close to the firewall outline. I came very close on it, but it looks like I got off about 1/8" in one section where the firewall changes angle. So unfortunately I'll have to do some surgery there and add a little fiberglass to extend it again (it's only about 3"). Given the horrid state of the cowl, I'm going to have to get used to doing fiberglass repairs. The fiberglass parts are the laughing stock of Van's, and I see why. It's going to be a nightmare to make it all fit together nicely.
I spent an hour slowly sanding away the flanges of the nose bowl where the top and bottom cowl nest together. While I got it close-ish, it's still horrendous and has a long way to go. I just need a decent fit for now so I can start to work on the hinge connections and firewall connections. Once that's all done I'll come back around to making it all pretty.
