Wendell Folks RV-8 Project - Page 41.

January 27, 2007:  While Wendell is working on the mechanical issues, I have been cutting the audio wires going to the head phones to insure the instrument panel is removable.  (Wendell is not a soldering iron guy for small wires.)  The black shell covers the microphone and head phone connections from the audio panel to the phone jacks to be installed near the seats.  The other DBM-25 connector with the purple and red wires among the white wires will eventually have all the power connections for the radio stack and fuel gauges running through it.  It is still a "work in progress".

Here is what Wendell was doing while I was soldering wires to computer connectors.  He has finished riveting the ELT transmitter mount to the aft baggage bulkhead panel.

A doubler plate was added to the front of the panel to insure the rivets would not pull through due to the weight of those eight D-cell batteries inside.

Behind the panel is enough space to allow the coaxial cable connection going to the ELT antenna.

January 28, 2007:  Another evening session with emphasis on wiring the various lights and gauges on the instrument panel that do not have their own dedicated wiring harness plugs.  These wires will mate with the DBM-25 "work in progress" plug seen in the photo at the top of this web page.  The selector switch for serial data going to the Dynon D10-A is also wired up to the RS-232 data from the GPS data power cable and the SL-30 NAV radio.  A data wire from the Garmin GTX-330 radar transponder was also added to provide traffic information service data to display on the Garmin GPS 396.

Behind the panel, the wires to Van's analog fuel gauges are now connected and running toward their rendezvous with the DBM-25 power plug mentioned above.  All those other empty DBM connectors have matching plugs in the wiring harnesses already installed in the fuselage.

Here is the other half of the audio panel connections for the microphones and headsets.  There is sufficient cable length to allow easy panel removal and connector separation when servicing anything behind the panel that cannot be done via the baggage compartment access door.

Here is the side view of the instrument panel showing the radio stack with the Garmin GPS 396 data power cable as installed via the GPS docking panel mount.