I've been thinking about how to run wires in an aluminum wing that is already
finished.
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Dear Tom,
This will sound a little hokey but it worked surprisingly well.
The 'wire' was in fact a piece of mini-coax with two stranded leads bundled
within an outer braided metal sheath. The wire was fixed to the area of the
new antenna/inspecition plate then secured to the ribs & bulkheads through
which it passed with blobs of an RTV compound applied via an piece of tubing 8'
long. The work went pretty quick, the fun part being the chorus-line of
inspectors, each for a particular aspect of the job, who bobbed & weaved their
way around each other to peek through their mirrors & telescopes as first the
wire was fished then the RTV elastomere was applied.
(O&R facility, NAS North Island, about 1973)
-R.S.Hoover
PS - Working inside a closed structure, be it wing, spar or whatever, is
usually called 'mouse work.' In fact, the buck for riviting under those
conditions is still called a mouse. The term supposedly stems from using a pet
mouse or rat to carry a thread the length of a DC-2 outer wing panel. Douglas
plant, early 1930's. The mouse story was still being told when my dad went to
work at El Segundo in 1937 but by then they had a whole array of blow-guns to
shoot a pilot line through a closed structure.
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