Wiring a 360 takes a lot of time.  I don't have my book with me but I would be amazed if it didn't turn out to be 200 hours or more by the time I'm done.  This includes figuring out where the wires go, designing and building places to clamp them down, as well as the actual cutting and terminating of all the tiny wires.

On the other hand, I am learning a lot about light aircraft electrical systems.  It's also enjoyable to be able to turn yet another system on every day.  Not like spending four years before you can get an aileron to wiggle back and forth, or the gear to go up and down.  Progress goes faster.

Randy's estimate of a month for a profession job sounds about right to me.  If they are charging a shop rate of $50 that works out to $8000.  At a shop rate of $1000, that's $16,000.  There is your ballpark.

I'd recommend -- and I can't afford this right now -- hiring a trained aircraft electronics technician to help you, but not to do it all by himself.  You will cut the time tremendously, get a professional job that works, and learn a lot.  Pay more and learn less, that's okay too, but it's not for me.  On the other hand, I have convinced myself that I cannot termnate an RG400 cable into the connector that goes to the radio trays, so I'm hiring that out.  As Dirty Harry says, "A man's got to know his limitations."

I have the Approach Systems wiring harness setup.  It's good stuff.  I would not recommend that any untrained person put all of those wire bundles together (unless you really have a lot of time) but I am wiring up the connector bundles for the engine monitor myself.  Mostly I'm just running power and ground wires all over the place.  BTW, one of my Approach Systems cables was miswired.  We had a horrendous squeal coming out of the headphones, and tracked it down to a miswired intercom cable.  We depinned two orange wires and swapped their locations and all was well.  My friends tell me that when they built the Javelin Jet they had similar problems with the Approach Systems cables.  Bottom line -- it's good stuff, and I'd use it again, but don't be surprised if you have to swap a few pins along the way.

The one product I would *not* use again is the Control Vision power distribution system (EXP2V BUS).  It works, and works well, but I think it ended up taking more time and money than a standard circuit breaker panel or fuses.

- Rob Wolf