With the upper and lower cowl flaps now installed, the large avionics job remained.

After some planning I laid out conduit for wiring so that there would only be one plug for the top and one for the bottom cowl. The the carefully applied paint was taken back to the carbon and I hot glued the channel in place.

After it was fixed I went ahead with micro to transition the edges and properly glue the ‘pipe’ in place. Then a layer of carbon fibre over the top.

The top cowl just needed the one bridging piece for the wiring.

It then got the royal treatment from my wiring expert, definitely not me!

Somehow he put a huge amount of circuitry into the little box. there are eight relays in there! Not only driving the up/down signals but also hooking up to the four flap microswitches and one on the throttle to give auto retract if I forget them at take-off. There is also taking the signal from the flap position indicator and hooking that into the Garmin engine box. A huge amount of work. I just had to secure the box in the hellhole with clickbonds and do a few other ‘homework’ tasks.

Here they are in action. The wiring worked first try which was impressive.

They do look good.

WEIGHT
A total gain of 2.32kg (5.1lbs) incl. all reinforcement and hardware
Before the mods: Lower Cowl 4.14kg (9lbs 2oz)   Upper 3.37kg (7lbs 7ozs)
After: Lower Cowl 5.38kg (11lbs 8oz)   Upper 4.45kg (9lbs 8ozs)

The upper and lower cowl will need a repaint. Partly from blistering when I lost coolant during testing and these big cutouts for the flaps will need some transitioning work and edge rectification to make them pretty.

With a number of other small jobs done, I am ready for slow and fast taxi testing on the runway.