The dreaded wiring....

Got quite a bit done this month. First of all I continued my paranoid sealing of the landing gear legs. As mentioned on an earlier post, many early Seareys allowed water to pour all over the inside of the hull as the gear retracted. I thought this was a crazy scenario so I have gone overboard on making sure this doesn't happen to mine and to ensure that the legs don't corrode from the inside out. I have now sealed the bottom of the leg with a rubber stopper, sealed in with Sicaflex.


bottom of gear leg with stopper

I also filled the spindles up with Sicaflex as I didn't want water getting trapped inside and corroding but before I did that I painted the outside with zinc chromate etch primer and coated the inside with 2 pack paint.

Spindles filled with Sicaflex

The next step is one of the hardest of all... the dreaded wiring! Luckily Rob Loneragan from Searey Australia supplies a list of what wiring is required and the wire gauge. I bought some aviation grade wiring a few months ago so I had it available when I needed it. As you can see from the folowing photos it looks like spaghetti spewing out of the frame and it took quite a few hours to complete...

Fitted the fuel sender...



Once the wiring was completed I thought I better make sure the landing gear system still worked... it didn't.. I traced the fault back to the electric actuator not being plugged in properly. In fact one of the terminal lugs in the plug wasn't locked into position properly so once that was fixed the gear worked perfectly.



However I wasn't really happy with the way that the crimp terminals on the wiring were just pushed onto the lugs on the relay. Aircraft suffer from a lot of vibration and I felt that after a while that one of the lugs would work itself loose and if just one of them did the gear wouldn't work. I decided to fit relay blocks where the wires are pushed into the bottom of the block and the relay plugs into the top of the block. The terminals in the block are held in with a small clip (and the relay terminal) so it is very unlikely that any wires could work loose.




As it is getting very close to fitting the frame to the hull I thought I would go around and check tighten all the nots and bolts that may be difficult to get to when the frame is in. After tightening I used a special marking paint called torque tube to mark that the nut had been tightened.



More sealing of the gear legs... even though I have coated the legs and spindle housings TWICE with 2 pack paint, I thought that some linseed oil poured inside as well couldn't hurt!




Drilled a drain hole for the baggage compartment including some stainless steel mesh to stop small objects falling through...




I fitted the spindle housings to the gear legs and sealed them well with sicaflex so the only water that should enter the gear leg assemblies is throught the drain hole in the housing however it can't get into the leg due to the rubber stopper.



Last thing for this month was ground bonding the fuel tank.. not sure if wire gauge is big enough so will check that out.



The frame WILL be in the hull next month!