Avionics and Panel wiring!

So I've mentioned before that I'm putting in a Garmin G3X avionics system. Over the last few weeks, the boxes have slowly been rolling in.

Putting it together has been kind of fun. Here is what the wiring diagram looks like:

Simple, right?

So, the crazy part is how these things are connected to one another. Think of each rectangle as a "black box" and the lines are the individual signal and power wires that go to each box. They are connected with DSUB pins. These are the kind of connectors you see on older monitors and printers. The only difference is, I am making the connections myself instead of just plugging a monitor cable into the end. 

Another intersting note is that the wire is pretty small - 22 gauge is typical. To put that in perspective, that's about 0.025 inches around. Kinda small. Typically, you would solder these connections. But since this is an airplane, we need a better connection. The answer is a crimped pin. 

Someone on vans air force was nice enough to let me borrow their military-spec crimper. This thing simply crimps down a pin or socket onto the wire. My avionics dealer has a series of videos on the tools, wire, crimping, etc. It's been very helpful. 

I put some Styrofoam models of the black boxes into the plane (this is before I had the real thing, and wanted to avoid damaging the real things moving them around) and planned out where all the wires would go. Then, I used the spaghetti diagram shown above to connect them all together using the tool and wires I was talking about earlier. 

 What's crazy is how precise the crimping is. In the second photo, you can see the slight difference between the top and bottom set of wires. The top set has too much insulation stripped off. The tolerance is 1/32 to 1/64 of an inch. Not much to work with there. The ones on bottom are within spec. 

Anyway, just do wires like that 70, 80 times and call it done! 

So, not much to show here other than I'm wiring away...