Last day of the month, being off the whole month I really put in some time on the plane, not nearly as much as I would have liked but I’ll take it. I figured it would not take long to rivet the battery tray to the floor so I started off with that. Then I realized almost all of my rivet pullers where too thick. I did not realize when I made the tray out of Z-bracket stock that the flange is so narrow that a rivet puller would not fit. Thankfully I had been buying pullers whenever I saw one that looked thin, I have 4 now. I had to go to my thinnest one that I picked up at Home Depot I think. Even with this one there were two rivets I could not get to due to the length of the puller. I finally ground down the head on one of the pullers to set the last two rivets. It is nice and solid, that tray is not going anywhere.
I then turned my attention to the ground block on the firewall, or forest of tabs as some like to call it. It is a brass plate with fast-on tabs soldered on. The thing gets bolted to the metal firewall making a common ground. I picked this up from B&C online. I then ran some ground wires through some clamps on the lower up rights. I still don’t want to cut these wires until I decide how to put in some kind of service loop. They should be long enough to have two additional terminals crimped on just in case.
I wanted to confirm I was reading the Smart Start schematic correctly so I hooked up all those wires temporarily to test things out. Sure enough, it all worked, pushed the arm switch and the start button on the stick made power go to the wire connected to the start relay, very cool.
