Repairs Complete!
19 Jul 2020Gkar_falcon
[19 0938 Z JUL 3306]What a harrowing 10 hours! Even with all the safety precautions I was taking, that was an incredibly stressful repair. I am going to have to look into designing a better emergency power circuit for the life support, but then, when would you ever expect to lose 2 primary power feeder relays at the same time?
The connection of the bypass harness went a lot smoother than I had expected, the life support only ended up being disconnected for approximately 2 minutes. It is a good thing I made every attempt to compete the bypass without disabling the emergency power circuit. The gauntlets hampered my fine motor skills so much that it took me nearly 10 minutes to connect the harness to the terminal board.
After I disconnected each of the power wires from the relays, I insulated all of them as best as I could. Each relay took nearly 45 minutes to complete from disconnection to insulation. As soon as the wires were out of the way, I removed the gauntlets. There was no way I was going to be able to complete the removal and installation of the relays comfortably with them on.
As an additional precaution I also installed a new relay into the #3 position. Once all the relays were installed, I connected all the non-power wires. The life support gets its power from the #1 relay, I listened for the disconnection of the emergency circuit power relay as soon as that was connected. It was quite a relief to hear the relay disconnect. It meant that I did not have to worry about the life support bypass any more.
A final half an hour was required to connect the power wires to relays #2 and #3, disconnect the life support emergency bypass, then I was finally in position to start testing. 3 hours of functional checks later, a further 2 hours to pre-flight (again) and we are here. It’s time to head to bed, I have earned this sleep tonight.