Weir's Corrolary to Honeck's Law:

"If you've got an airplane more than twenty years old, gut the wiring and
start from scratch."

In the case of a blueonblue182 that last saw the inside of a Wichita
aluminum tinkerhouse in 1958, the wiring was the original double-cotton
covered wire that cracked and split at the slightest touch. Fortunately (or
not, your call) the airplane was a total wreck salvaged (literally) from a
chicken ranch in the California central valley. It needed gutting anyway.

If you are going to do it, take a tip from Boeing. Get yourself several
DOZEN terminal strips

http://www.radioshack.com/search/ind...w=274-670&sr=1

and a couple of large sheets (or a few small sheets) of relatively thin
(0.025 or so) aluminum. Mount the terminal strips on the aluminum and mount
the aluminum "conveniently" under the panel where each of the terminal
strips is accessible. NO wire goes from point A to point B without stopping
by one of the terminal strips.

Go down to Wichita to one of the surplus houses and buy a few rolls of #18
and #22 aircraft wire. If you can talk your aircraft fixer into it, get a
few rolls of MIL-W-16878 (#24, the small thin PVC colored stuff) and use it
for all half-an-amp or less wiring. You'd be surprised at the weight
savings PLUS the capability of color-coding the wire. Buy a roll of RG-174
to use on the shielded stuff and a few feet of heavy duty shielded for the
mag wiring.

Boxes and boxes of crimp terminals.

Wiring isn't so much an art than lots of planning and forethought followed
by months of dangling upside down in your machine. Excel (or even better,
Access) is your friend in the planning process.

Tip ... Sharpie indelible pens come in all the 8 colors of the RETMA color
code ... (black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and gray,
less white). The "aircraft wire" will almost universally be white. Gin
yourself up a logical color scheme (fuel is the 200 series, lights are the
300 series, and so on) and mark both ends of the same wire with the wire
number ... hint, a double black mark shows you which stripe is the first
digit ... and then a clear shrink-sleeve over the markings will number the
wire for the next fifty years or so. Use gray sparingly...on white wire it
is nearly invisible.

All this stuff is in a Kitplanes series that I started nearly 12 years ago
but were done before I started putting them up on my website. Perhaps an
update in next year's KP is in order.

Jim


--
"If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right."
--Henry Ford



"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
ups.com...
As a follow on to Jay's previous post, has anyone attempted an "easy" or
"obvious" repair project, only to do something that really screwed up the
job and made it more expensive or time consuming to recover?

I am coining a new law, and -- since I've not seen it mentioned
anywhere -- I'm giving it my own moniker, "Honeck's Law".

Honeck's Law dictates that "Any work done under any aircraft panel
shall result in the need for further work to be done under the
panel."