Matt's RV-7 Project

I spent my two days of christmas vacation stringing more wires. Here you can see that most of the panel switches now have their power leads connected:

The black object attached to the center subpanel rib is the flasher for the landing lights. I got it all hooked up save for the wires that go out to the wings.

I got the two voltage regulators mostly connected, and ran a bunch of wires to the annunciator controller:

Pretty soon I'm going to need to run a whole bunch more wires back through the center tunnel, so I decided to remove the sticks and associated control system parts to make it easier to get my hands in there. I ended up cutting the two outboard ribs as you see here, so I could lift the whole stick assembly out as one piece – much easier that way. I'll have to fabricate some more F-716B splice plates, but that should be no big deal. I'm not sure why the plans don't have you cut all four of those center section ribs from the very beginning anyway.

This is what I woke up to today:

METAR KLWC 211352Z AUTO 30010KT 10SM CLR M16/M23 A3048 RMK AO2 SLP340 T11611228

For those of you who can't read a metar, it was 3°F (-16°C) while I was drinking my coffee this morning. With the winds at ten knots, the windchill was thirteen below zero. Ouch! In the garage, the heaters tried but failed to get the mercury up to the good side of freezing:

I spent most of the weekend inside, trying to find ways to advance the progress of the airplane project without actually having to touch cold things. I put in some CAD hours cleaning up various aspects of the electrical system and panel design, and I also soldered together the second revision of my annunciator controller board and wrote some test software for it. This time I used an Arduino Nano for the brains, which made it super easy to get the board checked out and the drivers written. Here's a photo of the finished product… the blue goo is RTV, used to keep the electrolytic capacitors from shaking loose:

I mounted it to the center subpanel rib with PCB standoffs. After that, the cold chased me back inside.

Also, my cats hate christmas: