I finally got my hands on some butane to allow me to test the Fuel Fume Detector as per the manual.  A few weeks ago I held up a rag with fuel on it to the sensor, but I learned that just overwhelms it.  It’s looking for vapors, not a blast in the face.

And the butane test proved that out.  At first I didn’t think it was working, but I kept at it at and after about 90 seconds it went into alarm mode.  Nice to know the sensor works as well.

Here’s a quick video showing the control head in the alarm state from the test.

I will note that I was using the (very) old, small nose gear backup battery to power this test.  I believe with full power the top center red alarm light will be brighter.  We’ll see since it was brighter when I tested the alarm previously on startup.

With the test good I pressed forward with mounting it into the bird.  I slathered the inside of the gray sleeve with RTV, slid it in place onto the fuel detector’s perimeter flange then slid both of those firmly into place on the mounting tab (pic 1).  I then terminated and connected the wires and wrangled those with some zip ties (pic 2).

Fuel fume detector unit install complete.

Concurrent to testing the fuel fume detector, I spent a couple of hours finalizing the wire management on the right side of the Tri-Paragon/avionics bay.

Here’s a shot of that… it’s ready for flight operations to commence!

Earlier in the day I stopped by the hangar to grab some measurements of the cable connectors for the antennas embedded in the canard.  My reference point in pic 1 is the center hole of the left upper canard mounting tab.  And in pic 2 I’m simply going off the trailing edge.

With those measurements, back in the shop in I was able to determine the length required for the NAV antenna pigtail and cut the new RG-58 cable I just received in prep of terminating it into a specific 90° connector for the GARMIN GNS-480.

As you can see, the remaining cable segment will be used as the COM1 pigtail out of the GNS-480, terminated as well into a 90° connector.

I did a good bit of work finalizing the plan for the pitot system as well and, again, deconflicting a bunch of wires to better organize them for HXr and GNS-480 install.

Pressing forward!