Wing wiring progress

We made some progress in wiring the wing, in preparation for riveting the outboard wing skins.

We added holes to the conduits, with bushings for the wires to come out:

Conduit hole with bushing
This was done with a heat gun with a circular tip, for simplicity - melting away the hole seems to be much more reliable in that it's unlikely that a cut will propagate and open up the conduit.

Heat gun for conduit holes

Opening holes in the conduits

Most holes were added near inspection panels (since that's where most equipment will be), except for the pitot heat controller box, which sits adjacent to one of those areas:


I was excited to pick a decent color scheme for the wiring, since so many colors are available, until I found out that most of the wires I'll end up running are shielded, and those are always white (with fixed colors for the inner conductors) :/

Given this, I decided to follow the Aveo colors for the wingtip wires (with one addition - using black/yellow for one of the returns). This is for the right wing, where the servos are - the left wing has antennas and thus gets the shielded equivalent.


We then started running wires:

Autopilot-to-trim-servo wires going through the conduit
For the pitot heat controller, I used 12AWG shielded cable (M27500-12TG2T14) - shielded so the magnetometer and NAV antenna can go on the wingtip without as much interference, and added connectors:

Pitot heat controller wired through conduit
I then ran the controller box wire to the bay where the pitot tube actually is, through the aft conduit Clickbond attachments:

Pitot heat wires going through Clickbond attachments
There'll be a lot more wiring to come, but most of that can be done with the wings closed - the main exception was the pitot heat, which will be much harder to access.

Time lapse:



Total wing ribs time: 16.3h

4 comments:

  1. I do not know the -10 wing in detail, but it looks to me that it will be very hard to get access to the pitot control unit after the skin is riveted on.
    On my -7 I tested acces with skins clecoed on and I had to move it.

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    1. (sorry, I had missed this comment before)
      Yeah, it's definitely not the easiest access, it'll be a pain if I need to do anything with it (e.g. may require removing the aileron pushrods), but I tried and it's doable.

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  2. Do you have a list of your wire order for the ziptips and other wing wiring? I just placed my order for my ziptips for our -10 build. Ive heard approx 30 ft from tip to panel but curious how much of each you ended up going with

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    Replies
    1. I haven't wired it yet, but my plan is to have a CPC at the wing root, then I don't have to get the right length from wingtip to panel, just from wingtip to wing root which is much easier.

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