CHAPTER 64 - Wiring

Also as part of the wing attachment, I wanted to complete the wiring for the lighting and the pitot heat. I had originally planned that the plugs would be between the wing and fuselage but I hadn’t realized that the space would be too narrow to get your hand in. Nor had I realized that the single strobe power supply was too large to fit under the seats. When I discovered the second problem, I did some looking around and found that most installations were behind the baggage bulkhead. In fact, Vans even sells a mounting kit for RV-7s and -9s. Well I made up my own mount as shown and routed the cables down the left side of the fuselage under the floor.

Then I turned to the wing attachment. Bringing the connections inside the fuselage meant a larger hole to accept the connectors from the wing. This would have to go behind the pushrods, so I drilled a large hole and used a rubber grommet to center the wires in it. I also used a clamp on the inboard wing rib to keep the wires from interfering with the pushrods. Inside, I used AMP connectors to make the connections and used ring terminals to a small bolt under the seat to ground the shielding for the strobe cables. The fourth photo shows how I ran the cable from the power supply on the left to the right wing, passing under the elevator pushrod. You can also see the tail position light wiring routed along the center tunnel to go up the center console to the panel. The big hammer wasn’t for wiring; it was for removing hardware store bolts and tapping in the replacement AN bolts during wing final assembly.

Finally, I had to deal with the wingtip attachments. I used the supplied AMP fittings for the strobe and 2-pin AMP fittings for the position lights. I fitted the strobes to the optional wingtip blisters that Vans supplies and felt that I needed to fabricate a backing plate instead of simply bolting the strobe assembly straight to fiberglass. With all the connections made I attached the Whelen power supply to a RadioShack DC power supply and made sure the strobe units worked. I’ll talk more about the tip mounts in another chapter.