Installed Pitch servo. Garmin is pretty adamant that the pushrod should be rigged so that the control hits the stops before you have any chance of an over center condition that would lock up a flight control, and that it happen prior to the horn hitting the stop bracket on the servo itself. Sort of a belt and suspenders approach.

This is easier said than done. The RV7 mount kit for the pitch servo comes with a 4" pushrod, and of course there's a requirement for a 3/8" min thread engagement, .45" ish preferred. I started with the pushrod ends set to approx 0.45" and used the center of the 3 holes afforded in the servo crank arm.

Running it through the range of motion prior to installing the stop bracket it was immediately obvious that sure enough, as soon as you ran the bellcrank fwd (up elevator) it would pull the servo pushrod over center, potentially bind you up in a full up elevator condition, and kill you dead.

This is the first design feature I've ran across on this airplane that made me feel that it could easily get you in serious airplane-destroying trouble if you didn't know what you were doing when you rigged it.

I played with this for quite a while, and some combinations of length and different control horn hole selection either caused me to hit the servo safety bracket before reaching full travel, or had good travel in one direction but hit the stop in the other.

The combination that worked was to use the pushrod mounting hole furthest away from the servo "axle"and adjust the pushrod for maximum allowable length while still maintaining the minimum of 3/8" thread engagement on each end. By setting it up this way I was able to achieve a nice safely margin against an over center condition. Also the elevator hits the up stop with about 1/8" clearance from the safety stop. At the aft throw it hits the down stop with enough clearance to slip a .020" feeler gage between the horn and the stop. If it turns out that the servo throw is too sensitive and I need to move this mechanism to a closer hole in the servo horn, I'll need to fabricate a new pushrod maybe 3/8" longer to get good thread engagement on the pushrod threads, but this meets the spec, so good enough for now.

Couldn't get much closer than that. I torqued everything to spec, then pinned and installed the wire connections.

I'm obviously not permanently installing and wiring up the roll servo because the wing isn't on, but I pinned the connector including the jumper wire that terminates the can bus on that end, and installed the dummy load connector that comes with the servo for testing.

A note on this dummy load; It's possible that at some point in the future, a servo might tank and I would need to pull it for replacement. Garmin has foreseen this possibility, as well as the likelihood that a guy wouldn't want to be grounded because removing an inop autopilot servo would open up the can bus and take a bunch of stuff off line.

They've come up with clever solution for this; both servos came with a D-sub connector that has the appropriate connections and resistors in it to simulate the presence of a servo in the system. In the event that you remove a servo for some reason, you stick this plug in the harness where normally it plugs into the servo, and the can bus remains healthy and everything else still works as normal. The instructions recommend keeping these plugs with the servos, so I think for the final install I'll bag these and zip tie one onto the wire bundle near each servo so they're handy if I or someone else has that scenario at some future point.

I was hoping that getting the can bus online would magically cure my Arinc data path fail issue on channel 2, but no such luck. While I was working on this, the fedex truck showed up with my charger/power supply from earthX so I was able to power everything up and I still had the same issue. Lot's more head scratching ensued.