Wiring Harness

The RotorWay harness is very well thought out and gives you just enough wire to get where you need to go to.

They even ran one extra wire for the avionics positive line which is a help and it's just about all mill-spec wire.  We added many wires to it because we chose to install all of our avionics now so we wouldn't have to tear the ship to pieces again and again installing components one at a time.  That would really bite for sure and after putting the ship all back together again you would have to hang test it all over again too as this stuff and its wiring adds quite a bit of weight all over the ship.

  Something we didn't like was strapping all the wires to the frame so we used pipe clamps to suspend the wiring off the frame plus wrapped all our wires in non FAA approved automotive wire wrap, orange (Tennessee's color to boot!  lol).  This helps support the wires plus it helps to protect it and makes the ship look alot neater in appearance.  It adds weight for sure but we feel this will make for much less trouble later on down the road as the ship begins to age (we're both little people and figure we can add some weight and not bother us).

The down sides are should a fire break out the toxic fumes from the burning plastics will be really tough on us.

When you add something to the ship like the bearing temp gauge for example it makes life hell running new lines in the harness, one more reason we chose to add every thing we thought we'd ever use the first time around.

Another thing to do is be sure to add extra wires while your running the harness

so you can add something simple later on instead of doing it the hard way.  We added three extra positive lines and three extra grounds and ended up using every one of them in unexpected things like the strobe lights because they couldn't be hooked into the place we had intended due to the fact that they placed a popping noise in the headsets and had to be on their own line direct to the battery.

Another thing to think about is the simple little panel post light on the overhead switch panel. They don't tell you your going to need one if you fly at or near dark and if you want it to turn off and on and dim with the rest of the ships instrument lights it has to have separate lines ran up there, both positive and negative.