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Dave's RV-7A Builder's Log
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Date: 12-18-2016
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Number of Hours: 6.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Standby alternator wiring
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Mark your wires…just do it…trust me, you will thank me later. Remember yesterday’s bonus mystery wire? It plays significantly into the story today…more on that in a bit. Record low temps for December in Kansas today—it was -11 when I arrived at the hangar—so I wasn’t sure how long I would stay, but I was determined to figure out the wiring for the standby alternator before I left. By the end of the session I had it all installed, but the path I went down to accomplish that was a bit unplanned.
Yesterday before I left, I had made notes of the wiring tasks still to be accomplished. One of those items was to figure out where the 20 AWG wire coming off of the Stby Alt switch had terminated. In theory it should have been somewhere near the controller on the firewall, but I couldn’t find it. When I climbed under the panel (see first picture for full effect) I started using the multimeter to find my wire. After about five minutes of searching, and acting on a hunch, I connected the top terminal on the switch to the ground block and was rewarded (punished?) with a tone from the multimeter…I had connected the wire to ground. Oops. Unfortunately, aside from the rookie mistake, I had also cut it too short to reach the controller. Since I had to run a 22 AWG wire from the controller to the aux bus, I decided to replace, rather than splice the field wire, so out with the flush cutters and start cutting the zip ties.
It was at that point that I had to know where my mystery black wire originated…if I had screwed one up, who knows what else I got wrong. The process of finding the wire went all the way back to when I added a second radio…and running a new ground for COM 1. After cutting every zip tie between the ground block and the com radio harness to trace the path, I was able to determine that it was my COM 1 ground wire. At least I got that one right. 100 zip ties later the bundle was better than ever and I climbed out. Did I mention that I got the standby alternator wiring finished?
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A mess of my own creation...
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Standby alternator controller and associated wiring
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