Punched battery box holes
A local RV-6A builder, Dave Burton, stopped by with a 2″ Greenlee punch. He read on my site that I was having trouble cutting the holes with a hole saw, so he offered to help. The punch worked great. It’s definitely the easiest way to cut a hole in sheet metal. It would be nice to have a set of punches, but I wouldn’t get enough use out of them for the cost. Luckily, I was outbid on the punch I tried to buy on Ebay. It was for 2″ conduit, so it ended up making a hole larger than 2″. Dave said some of the punches are labeled for a conduit size and some are labeled for the cutout size. I think for the few small wiring and firewall holes I still need to make, a Unibit will work fine.
Anyway, we punched the hole in the firewall for the cabin heat very easily. After that, we finished up the lightening holes in the battery box. Well, I actually just did lightening holes on the front side. The small weight savings wasn’t worth the hassle of cutting the holes on the back. I just wanted to finish up the front so that it looked symmetrical.
Reading through some old messages from the Yahoo Group email list, I found some advice on wiring sizing. Read AC 43-13. There’s a whole chapter in there on wire sizing with tables and graphs. You can really go crazy with calculating the wire size if you want. The main point is to make the wire big enough so that 1) the wire won’t burn up before the fuse blows during a short circuit, and 2) the voltage drop in the wire is kept to a minimum. I’m still reading through the chapter, but I’ll summarize it when I get it figured out.
Also, the stick grips I ordered from Michael Lewis showed up, only a week after I ordered them! He doesn’t have a web site, but will send you information via email (michael at kalama dotcom). The grips looks awesome. You can completely customize the sticks, left-handed, right-handed, ambidextrous, any number of switches up to 5, etc. I ordered both grips ambidextrous. They don’t have the cool finger contours, but they are comfortable for either hand. The pilot’s grip has a trim coolie hat, push-to-talk button, and frequency flip-flop button. The co-pilot gets nothin’. It’s too much hassle to wire anything in the co-pilot stick since it’s removable. I’m still debating about whether I want to stick (sorry about the pun) with the ambidextrous grip for the pilot or go with a left-handed grip. The only drawback with the ambi is that the PTT button is on the top of the grip instead of under the index finger. When I fly the Cessnas, I always fly with my left hand. And I’m used to having the PTT button under my index finger. Hmmm, decisions, decisions.
