We recently acquired a new temporary guest, Jim Sherry's fine RV8 is parked in our hangar at the moment as he is having a problem with his hangar door. Even though it isn't an RV7, it sure is nice inspiration to see what the heck the end goal looks like! Its nice to crack open the hangar door and see this baby.
It was another big week, hours-wise, for me as I zoomed past 2000 hrs! Wow, 1000 hr thresholds are pretty cool. I have logged nearly 60 hrs the last two weeks combined. Although, unfortunately I cant say I have seen a ton of progress with those hours as I've had to backtrack and redo some things. There is no doubt, the tasks seem to be never ending right now.
My hangar mate, Bill Shook, hung his engine (IO-360 angle valve) by himself...in less than an hour. Nice work Bill, I'm impressed! He has a lot of experience mounting engines in race cars so I'm sure that helped. With Bill and I, the hangar activity is at a high level these days.
I am looking at some schematics that Stein produced for Bill's project (which is very similar to mine and are a great reference) and I started wondering why they show "three" wires going to the headphone jack?? In my SportAir wiring class, we did a complete working headset wire harness and although the microphone had three wires (one for PTT), the headphone side only had TWO...not three! Consequently, that's the way I wired mine.
Well, come to find out...what I wired in the SportAir class was a "mono" headphone setup...not "stereo". Shit! I already had the wires terminated, routed and tie wrapped. Dangit to heck, out they came so I could redo them with three conductor shielded wire.
Problem was, I didn't have enough three conductor shielded wire to redo them. Bill says, I have quite a bit leftover from mine...you are welcome to it. The next day, laying on my HS was this little nugget waiting for me. Dang, that was a huge help not to have to pay shipping and wait! The people in the RV community really are pretty great. He insisted on not letting me pay him either...but I will somehow, shielded wire is not cheap.
Getting wires prepped to be terminated, these are the headphone/microphone wires going to the PAR100EX (my audio panel and second comm). These will terminate in 44 pin, high density D-sub connectors with solder pins. I have now learned, I pretty much hate solder pins...crimp pins are so much nicer and quicker. In fact, one of my pins already broke off when I went to install it, which doesn't give me a warm fuzzy...now I need a special high density extraction tool to get that bugger out...what a pain.
As much as I am working like a dog trying to finish up and avoiding socializing...it can't be all work, work, work. Bill brought it some Elk/chorizo burgers and some chicken with a spicy rub on Sunday that we bbq-ed at the hangar. That pretty much put an end to any productivity on the project for the day, but it was good to visit with the guys and have a few beers.
After we ate...my other hangar mate, Bob Markert, decides he needs to spread his roll bar...now. Basically, with the RV8's, sometimes the welded steel roll bar is not wide enough so it needs to be "adjusted". Bill and Bob pull their trucks around and hook up ratchet straps to the roll bar. And no, they did not use their trucks to pull it...just the straps. I was amazed that we had to go a good 3+" past the desired width to get it to deform...it really sprung back a lot! It was funny to watch all the guys pull up chairs to eagerly watch this adventure unfold!! Luckily no one got hurt. ;)
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