|
Rob,
That sounds about right. It's
a long process, one wire at a time. It's also important to wire your plane
correctly. The right wire size and type, ground loops and proper placement of
power wires. If wired correctly your plane will work properly, safely and
quietly. Wiring it wrong could be a disaster in the air.
You have a few talented
builders at CMA, I fly over there all the time. I don't know what shops you have
available to you there but they will be at least $100 an hour.
Randy
Stuart
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 6:12
PM
Subject: [LML] Re: Wiring a 360
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
|