Posts by Dave Berenholtz

More progress with the panel on the bench. I mainly still watch with an occasional label or other task. It is good to be there as we have to make decisions now and again. These get done on the spot. This has all taken many evening sessions, probably another 30+ hours. Maybe I did something useful for 5 of them.

While there is a lot going on. It is in fact very neat. Or will be when things are in place.

Every switch has a story.

The electronics here for the two AG6 warning devices. One is for fuel levels, a critical item. The other is canopy warning. The rest turns out to be configurable using the G3X. I still like a prominent “the canopy is unlatched and will fly open in flight you fool” aka a red button switch annunciation.

Plenty of earths on that tree. A lot going on for the audio panel too.

A pic from the back, getting all this in the plane is another kettle of fish.

Even more things to get plugged in.

This is the shot to compare to earlier posts. We are pretty much ready to put smoke in the wires here and see if any comes out.

Frankly, Simon (last name not available) who installed all this has seriously impressed me with his thoroughness, skill, diligence and knowledge. I’m sure he will never read this blog so don’t mention it OK? If people find out he will get even busier and we will never finish.

A few money shots. Everything has worked first time. I have to say the G5 is great as a standby instrument and required for IFR. I’m not sure how useful its going to be in normal flight as it mirrors the PFD (Primary Flight Display). I’m looking forward to finding out.

We still have a few things to finish. One autopilot servo is faulty so thats getting replaced, we have more configuration to do in software and a few switches and a dual dimmer pot to add. You can see again this is the practice panel, not the final one where the labeling is nicer. We of course can’t hook up several things until the engine and the ignition system is delivered.

We are much closer to moving to install in the plane. So maybe half way or better for the avionics.

Garmin have added a canard icon for the G3X. Thanks guys.

The electronics for the nose gear were a big deal. It comes from a Marc Zeitlin design. Here’s a link to the schematic

From there Wade Parton, a skilled Long-EZ builder, did some great work tweaking the circuit.

Then my wiring guy, Simon, added his extensive knowledge and magic to go over the circuit and make things quite a bit smaller and lighter along with a few other tweaks. The drawing below gives an idea of whats happening.

I’m not giving Simon’s details, he is too busy working on my wiring and I will not be the reason for extra distractions.

We have a great extend and retract on a linear actuator which comes from Jack Wilhelmson, EZ-Noselift.com

I wanted a different auto extend and emergency extend and thats what all the circuits and fuss is about.

It was Marc’s idea to make something that worked in a particular speed range AND have an onboard laser sensing if you are 300 feet from the ground.

If you are having a very bad day and ignore the gear warning systems triggered off the throttle retard, Marc’s concept is that it will extend automatically. In my opinion this is an improvement on the one Jack offers although his has worked very well for many years in lots of planes.

As I pilot I can say that of course we never forget our checklists and drills for putting the gear down. However, if three or more things happen at once that you didn’t expect at a critical time in the landing phase… well, some great airmen have forgotten the gear.  I wish to avoid the embarrassment and not join the nose draggers club.

There is a lot of magic in the box. Simon made two so I can swap one out if I have problems reducing any downtime.

It is very likely I will never need the second box. Probably because there is one!

Here it is, box in place. There is also an emergency extend. This button bypasses all the electronics and puts power to the actuator from the standby battery. That battery gets charged in flight so its always ready.

The lights are very simple. Yellow when the gear is running. You might notice I have it installed in the plane with the lettering plate. Exciting to have a small part of the panel installed.

Green when the gear is down. No light when the gear is retracted. So it conforms to the dark cockpit concept when all is well. Just like a Boeing.

As usual crazy hours were involved in all this which I’m not logging.

More Wiring work on the Panel.  You may need to look carefully to see any changes. It is progressing.

You might notice the earth bus is filling up

Breakout plugs are happening all over the place.

This is mainly Simon’s (wiring Guy) work, well more than mainly. Sitting in on it is giving me an understanding of how things flow together. It will help for troubleshooting more than if I had nothing to do with the process.

I can hardly log all the hours. I’ll put in a few for the small amount of work I’ve done over some weeks on this.

The panel wiring has seriously begun. We have had many past discussions, drawings prepared and a session or two with just the manuals marking out which things we need. (I haven’t logged all that)

The super capable ‘installer’, Simon, is doing all the work. I’m along for the ride for discussions and a few minor assistant jobs. Making wiring labels, a bit of heat shrink work even some pin crimping. A great benefit is that I am getting some understanding of how the systems work together. Can bus, RS232 protocols and so on.

I’ll put some of the hours we have spent in this log only for completeness as it is a very major part of the build. I am there at the bench even though Simon is really doing it all.

After a nights work I have started taking a progress pic.

More wires each time. Every wire has a decision attached.

They all have labels at each end as well.

Sometimes its hard to see a whole nights work.

Top right corner are some new things.

A bit of a tidy up here.

A lot of audio wires are in. That’s the GMA350HC audio panel on the bottom.

The main G3X GDU460 screen is fired up.

This is only to check out a camera input. Simon had a car backing camera that we used for a test. Its looking at its own insides, which is looking at its own insides, which is looking at its own insides…..

A terrible idea has happened. I’m looking into super expensive night vision camera’s now I have a place to display camera images.

I picked up the panel after screen printing at Niddrie Nameplates. It looks a lot better than my first attempt!

Just sitting in place for now. It will be carefully wrapped up while we use the practice panel for the initial wiring work.

Another view.

I think I have the lettering far enough away from the left edges to allow for the bezels..

I will have to paint some screw heads grey to match.

Nice and simple for the nose gear.

I ran out of holes to put in the passenger eject button. A blast of anti-matter will have to do instead.

You might notice the logo here is the same one on this website. Post Covid around the world is still the plan.

This Panel lettering has been an epic over a couple of months after literally years of thinking about it. I fielded a lot of ideas, tried various methods and came up with Futura fonts and the concept of dry transfer rub-on letters.

I found a company in Canada that you could send a pdf to and back would come a sheet of whatever you gave them. I thought I had all the wording sorted out so I went ahead.

Most of the letters went on ‘OK’. Maybe because they were small there was very little adhesive on the back so the transfer was challenging.

I had to press really hard to get the lettering off the plastic sheet. That sheet was really quite thick so it tended to distort and that meant some letters were crooked and had to be saved from breaking up all together. They weren’t exactly straight either.

I’d give my work here 6/10 at best.

It’s a little boring too and after a chat with my electrical installer, Simon, he pointed out a number of things that could have been better in the lettering department at explaining switch functions.

Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and go again. Into the sand blaster went my finished panel!  I then again painted with the grey primer and did a 2K matt finish on top.

Here’s the next draft. A sketch was required for proper screen printers to now do the work. They do the artwork and I took the panel down to them explained the job and got an acceptable quote. You can see I’ve put washers around the holes. Maybe I should have outline the bezels too as I did for the G5 instrument.

I did yet another sketch as I’m now going with a side metal panel face plate for the nose gear switches.

Simon then gave more excellent input. You can see things are better grouped here. The printers use Arial Narrow which was indistinguishable from my Futura HV BT in the small sizes. I went with that. NASA use the Futura which is fun but it is not enough reason to make life harder.

This came back from the printers for approval. They did a great job. Its in CorelDraw. However there were issues. Because the panel is so tight allowances need to be made for the size of washers around the switches. I did draw that in my sketch but it got lost in translation.

Another critical thing is that the bezels from the instruments extend well past the cutouts so you could not do what is in that first draft. Much of the lettering and borders would be covered up! I could have made that clearer with my instructions although I did supply the above picture and others

Luckily they sent me these transparency’s against the panel for approval. Its a great way to check out how it will look.  If you check out the previous picture you might see that the word ‘POWER’ would be completely covered. ‘ECU1’ would have been partly covered by the switch washer too. We are talking very small tolerances.

Here again the bottom of the G3X would cover the ‘LIGHTS’ word and bump into the top border bracket. The left side border would be completely covered by the audio panel.

The printers did a great job, I’m pointing out how very tricky a tight panel can be in case YOU are doing one. You also probably need to be an avionics installer to pick all the possible problems.

I was worried about setting up the initial file to be the exact right size. Particularly if I had to buy and learn a software package just for this one job. That’s why I went the dry transfer route initially. In the end tweaking the printers work myself in the software they use was the perfect solution.

I downloaded an evaluation copy of CorelDraw which is good for 14 days. Corel seem quite OK with doing this for a one time project. The package was easy to work just to change things. The hard part being the initial setup which the printers had done. I just altered the existing ,cdr file they gave me.

The version pictured above I think is AOK. I spent several days tweaking versions. You can convert the .cdr file to a pdf to print out actual size so I could check with switch washers. I guessed with the bezels using photos. The differences are small but I hope it will all work. Another chat with Simon had yet again a few minor changes right at the end of the process. Other things were done with the words and switch positions just to make it all fit. I stuck my logo in as well.

For now I’m waiting to hear that the job is done. If I stuffed up its off to the sandblasting cabinet again.