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.
----- 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