Been a while since my last entry. In the interim, Kriya and I spent a week on vacation in Colorado, then a second week at Table Rock shopping for a vacation house. We sold our house in Scottsdale and this one will do double duty as a vacation house for the family and a crash pad for me to stay at when I go down there to visit my folks. My mom has broken her second hip 10 months after the first and has transitioned from rehab to long term care. I'll be going down there frequently to visit with her and support my dad however I can.
Back to the plane;
I elected to go with the EFII fuel pump based on recommendations from VAF. The plumbing is a lot simpler than the van's supplied unit, with only a few simple plumbing lines and a minimal amount of fittings. Less of that stuff is better, and to quote a friend of mine "the Vans fuel pump plumbing looks like a french horn"
Unfortunately, simpler in design doesn't always mean simpler to implement. I've got an idea of how I want to mount this and route lines, but the tube bender I've had in my handyman plumbing box for 30 years is incapable of making a tight enough 180* bend, plus it tends to mar the soft 3003 tubing. I've ordered a fancy tube bender from Spruce, so will circle back to this in a few days.
Once I failed at bending fuel lines, I went back to the ELT installation. I have elected to go with the shorter ELT antenna under the aft intersection fairing between the horizontal & vertical. People report good results with this location, but it's not without controversy.
The ELT manual says the antenna should be oriented vertically. but it also has minimum separation requirements from other antennas. The Garmin manual has even greater separation requirements. The RV7 can't practically accomplish both of these, and I'd rather have good antenna separation because I need those comms to work on every flight. Besides, it seems like in most off field landings, the RV7 stands a pretty good chance of ending up on it's back, so it seems like an ELT antenna on the top of the tailcone is a real crap shoot in an actual crash, compared to a C172 or something where it stands a pretty good chance of staying upright.
By putting the antenna all the way back there, the coax that came with it is about a foot too short, so I made up a new one the correct length. Was going to route it down the sidewall above the middle J channels with tie wraps, but I wasn't happy with the transitions around the bulkheads not potentially chaffing, so I elected to run them through the bulkhead pass throughs previously drilled in the floor.
People are quick to point out that you shouldn't run this cable through frames because of the potential for it to get severed in a crash. While I understand the concept, I think having it protected from chaffing on a daily basis is more important. Plus, the advisory circular that deals with ELT installations (AC91-44A) doesn't actually say anything about routing through bulkheads, but it does say tons of other stuff that people violate on a regular basis. It's all a tradeoff and this is the tradeoff I've elected to make. If it doesn't ops check okay then I'll do something else, but at this point, I'm pretty happy.