I primed the avionics rack support pieces Friday night and went to rivet the nutplates on Saturday, only to discover that I didn't have enough of them. Oh well, I guess its time for yet another order of odds and ends, as I have a half-page list of little items.

I made a very welcome discovery with the Garmin GNS-430 today. It has always been quite finicky to get it to fully slip into the rack. Today I finally took the time to properly investigate the reason. Once I looked carefully at the back of the GNS-430, I could see that one of the connectors showed evidence of hitting on the edge of the backshell, rather than slipping properly in place. Once I knew what was going on, I tried removing the transponder from its tray, and sticking a finger up from below the panel to push up on the end of the GNS-430 as I slipped in place. This allowed that connector to mate properly the first time without all the jiggling that it used to need. It sometimes used to take five minutes of messing around to get the GNS to properly mate with its connectors.

I finished the wiring for the cockpit flood lights on Saturday and today I removed the canopy bow so I could install the plate nuts that the flood light supports bolt into. I had thought about changing my mount to be similar to the one that a viewer has on his RV-6, but I determined that moving the floods further forward and outboard would provide even worse illumination than my current marginal setup.

Today I attached the routing and connections of the static line. I had previously run it from the aft fuselage static ports to the instrument panel area, but now I need to run it to each instrument that requires it. I had a concept of how I would route it, but today I decided that Plan A wasn't going to work, as there was a dearth of places to secure the polyurethane tube to keep it from getting chafed. I came up with Plan B and secured the tube in several places to get it up behind the airspeed indicator. I had previously order a bunch of fittings to go with Plan A, but I need a slightly different mix of fittings for Plan B. So I'll stop here until the other ones arrive.

This evening I spent a bunch of time poring through catalogs so I could order the stuff I need. And of course no one vendor carried everything I needed, so I had to put in two orders.

I'm not sure what I'll work on this week. Perhaps I'll try to finish off the pitch and roll trim wiring.