I was on the road most of the week, which was a crying shame as the weather was pretty much perfect. I would have loved to go flying. Of course the good weather disappeared as soon as the weekend hit.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the hangar, attacking the standby alternator voltage regulator power wire. It turns out that I did not install the wire from the standby alternator control relay to the big capacitor by the voltage regulator when I was installing the aircraft wiring. It looks like I didn’t have a suitable ring terminal. I should have put this open item on my big open items list, so I wouldn’t forget it. But, I never did that, so this wire never got installed. Once I got flying, I found that the standby alternator wasn’t working. I finally dug into the snag a few weeks ago, crawling under the panel with a copy of the wiring diagram and a multimeter. I quickly discovered the problem, and ordered the needed ring terminal.

It sure would have been a lot easier to install this wire when I was doing the rest of the wiring. I had to run it all the way from the right side of the instrument panel to the left landing gear box area. I was ever so happy I had added the access door in the aft wall of the forward baggage area.

It cost me about 2.5 hours and a couple of skinned knuckles, but I got the errant wire installed and tested with a multimeter. I’ll test the standby alternator the next time I go flying.