Fuselage July 2007 Updates
July 19, 2007
AF-3500 Arrives.... - 0.0 hrs


The EFIS finally arrived. I got a call from Tim Hass last week that the EFIS was in and he would make up the harness and ship it right away. Tim with Approach Faststack has been first class on everything. This is the last piece for the panel. The hold up was the backlog at Advanced. From everything I hear Rob and his team are doing a great job of ramping up production and keeping up with firmware.

The first thing I wanted to do was power it up so I poped it on the bench and hooked up power per the manual. The screen came alive and a message came up loading firmware. In about 10 seconds the EFIS screen came up. These pictures do not do it justice. The clarity is perfect. I will retake them with my other camera and reload thise weekend.

When you apply power it also charges the backup battery which I added for power out situations. This could at least get you back to the nearest airport if there was a problem. The screens are very intuitive. There are 20 pages of checklists. Everything from pre-flight to emergency situations.

The first thing I noticed was to get this up high enough in the panel I will need to cut into one of the panel ribs. I called Jim Kiloh and talked to him as he had to do the same thing with his GRT panels. I am going to sun a 3/4 angle from the fat part of the rib to above where I make the cut and rivet it in place after the cut. This will provide stiffness back to the rib. The rib that you really need to not mess with in a slider is the center one.



This website was built to document my work in compliance with the FAA requirements needed to certify my aircraft.
My experiences and comments are by no means to be considered as instructions on how to build any aircraft.