Fuselage continued…

Seat belts going in. I love Hookers!!

Seat belts installed.

Seat belts installed.

Canopy wiring harness and red/white strip lights going in.

Here’s a hint: don’t even bother with the WH-00126; it’s a generic harness and isn’t likely to match anybody’s requirements exactly – or even very closely. Just use the supplied Molex shells and pins to quickly fab your own.

In my case, I needed to wire the defrost fans, the strip lights, and the canopy warning switch. Easy-peasy. Except, of course, for one task…

Canopy wiring harness and red/white strip lights going in.

This is the beginning of the ugly task/odyssey revolving around running the two wires aft through the left-side canopy frame to the warning switch.

Van’s suggests using a length of safety wire to “fish” the wires down the channel. I tried two thicknesses of safety wire and both got kinked/hung up.

This time around, the safety wire made it through, but got hung up when pulling the copper wires.

Harness and Molex connectors in work.

Another iteration of the effort. No luck.

I tried using old plastic cards (credit cards, driver’s licenses, etc.) to pry the canopy side skin away to make a little more room in the channel. No luck.

Eventually, I had to suck it up and drill the side skin mostly off in order to place the two wires. Then re-riveted and re-screwed. I managed to drill out something like 40 rivets without buggering a single one, so that’s good.

Connectors connected.

Re-riveting underway…

Re-riveting underway…

Job done!