I know it has been a minute since I posted but that doesn’t mean I have not done anything on the airplane. I am currently in the middle of Section 38 which is the window, and it is easily the most time consuming section of the project so far. After completing Section 37, I was waiting for the finish kit to arrive. So, in the meantime, I decided to tackle the Fuselage wire harness. After attending the EAA Electrical Workshop in March, I thought I had the confidence to do this myself rather than buy the harness.

After studying the Electrical Schematic provided by Vans Aircraft, I proceed to buy the needed tools, wire from Stein Air, and connector hardware from Digikey.

I then decided to make a wiring board. With this big piece of MDF, I laid out the wiring to match the schematic. I have to say that the VANS schematic was very detailed and complete. Since I am going with the standard wiring, there was very little I needed to decide or interpret.

This was an early version. I decided the curves were too extreme for it to work properly.

I eventually landed on this pattern. I believe this photo shows all the wires laid out. The next step is to attach connectors. Molex, both the 0.063″ type and micro-molex were used. The end terminating inside the avionics panel (lower left) was a combination of Molex and a 50-pin/socket D-Sub.

An example of a Molex connector.

This shows the bundles for the Molex (bigger wires on top), and the Dsub wires. Each wire was labeled, and there are several shielded cables where I had to solder in ground wires to the grounded shield.

The harness is actually two separate harnesses: left and right. Each has a branch leading to the respective wing on that side.

This is one of the harnesses laid on the floor. Next step was to get it into the fuselage. It wasn’t as bad as expected.

This is looking straight down into the cockpit area with the left harness sort of laid in there. The Molex at the bottom of the photo connects to the Molex from the tail of the airplane (provided by Vans).

This shows the Dsub and Molex wire bundles hanging beneath the Avionics panel area. As of the date of this writing, I have not attached the Dsub or Molex yet.

This is the branch that comes out of the fuselage to attach to the wing harness. These wires will power lots of things including the wing tip strobes, landing lights, magnetometer, pitot tube heat, aileron trim, autopilot servo, etc.