Acquiring Hardware

Posted On October 17, 2019

I haven’t posted in about a week, but I’ve been pretty busy acquiring a bunch of stuff that I’ll need in the coming weeks. I decided it was high time that I think about wiring – so I did, coming up with a few diagrams, wire lists, and connector needs, and put a bunch of stuff on order. I’ve been keeping the UPS, USPS, and FedEx delivery drivers busy this past week!

A short list of things that I’ve acquired in the past 7 days:

• Lights for wing tips, rudder, and belly
• Wiring for most of the fuselage, minus the instrument panel
• Electrical connectors for wing-to-fuselage junction
• Electrical connectors for lights
• Transponder antenna
• Flush rivets for fuselage
• A bunch of different sizes of AN bolts

The first few in particular required some planning that I have in diagram and spreadsheet form, I’ll post them here to help others.

Below is the spreadsheet with the wirelist I have (so far). The lengths of the cables came from the colored lines in the diagram above (Visio has a measure tool), to which I added 10%, and then after summing it together, I rounded up a few feet to something that made sense. In the case of the M22759/16-22 wire, I just decided to order a 250 ft spool, since there was a healthy price break, and I figure I’ll be using a lot of it when it comes time to wire up the instrument panel (IP). I ordered all the wire from Prowire, since there prices were quite a bit better than Aircraft Spruce. Prowire sells both M22759/16 and M22759/32 wire, the difference is in the thickness of the Tefzel jacket. Although the lighter weight of the /32 variant is tempting, I would caution others to buy the /16 variant of wire for one reason: the Tefzel jacket on the /32 wire is thinner than the /16 version, and I found that the environmental seals on the electrical connectors I got for the wing wouldn’t work with the thinner wire. The difference in weight is negligible for a small GA plane.