Earlier in the week I put the final holes in the spinner spacers. Today I took a closer look at them and decided that I didn't have enough of a gap between the prop blade shanks and the spacers. I don't want to chance having the spinner move a bit and ding the prop, so I opened up the gap to 3/32". I primed the inside of the spacers, and I'll rivet them in place sometime this week.
The 14v bulbs for the annunciator lights finally arrived. Dave B., an RV-6 builder, read that I was hoping to find something other than 28v bulbs. He apparently has something to do with light bulbs at work, so he was able to point me at a place in Canada that carried the bulbs I needed. It took forever for them to arrive (mind you, I did opt for cheap shipping, rather than quick), but they are exactly what I needed. I installed them in the panel earlier in the week and did quite a bit of messing around in the dark one evening with a potentiometer in the loop to see what voltage I need for night operation. I eventually decided that I should run them at 7-8v in the DIM setting. They will be running off my Essential Bus, which gets fed through a diode with a 0.75v drop. So, I bought a 5v zener diode, and sometime this week I'll work to wire it up to the dimmer switch.
Thanks Dave! I really appreciated the assistance.
I expected that it would be a quick job to connect the alternator load meter wires to the engine monitor. Thoughts like that are the kiss of death. When I looked at the engine monitor wiring I realized that I had already used the 4.8v power that the load meter Hall effect sensor needed. It was used to power the fuel pressure sender, and it was buried in a wire bundle. It took about two hours to open up the wire bundle, spice into the 4.8v wire, and hook up the three wires for the load meter. I should have thought ahead a bit when I put in the fuel pressure sender. This time I left a loose 4.8v wire, coiled up and labeled just in case I need another power supply later.
To further complicate life, it turns out I need to upgrade the software in my engine monitor to have the alternator load meter read over 50a. Hopefully there is a way for me to upgrade the software, rather than having to ship it back to Grand Rapids.
I'm slowly working down the list of things to do before I can rivet on the upper forward fuselage skin. The Ottawa Jazz Festival is coming up, and we'll probably spend much of the next two weekends there. But, hopefully soon after that I'll be able to rivet on that skin.