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In June of 2007 we attended the Cherokee Pilots Association convention at Tan-Tar-A resort, in Osage Beach, Missouri.   While there, we won an AvTek door seal in one of the drawings.

Since we apparently  have the only Cherokee in the world with a perfect-fitting door -- our door seal is flawless -- I had no need for this marvelous prize.  So, when I got home I managed to work a swap with AvTek's owner, Mike Peters, to give me a nice discount on his Pulsar landing-light controller instead.

As luck would have it, the box sat on my dresser until September, unopened.  We were just so danged busy at the hotel that there was no time to install it!  When I finally opened it I discovered, to my horror, that it was the wrong unit.  The Pulsar I needed pulsed TWO landing lights, in a wig-wag fashion; the one in the box pulsed a single landing light, which is what most Cherokees have.

Calling Mike, he quickly and gladly exchanged it for the proper unit.  Of course, being in California, this swap took ten days, by which point we were into October.

Why I'm Not an A&P

This is when the comedy of errors began.  The wires for the unit are attached to the back of the landing light switch. (There is also a power wire, that goes to the main bus.) In a Cherokee, this switch is in a particularly inaccessible bank of switches, which is impossible to access from below.  Accessing from the front means removing at least the bottom radio and avionics tray, which then lets you undo the six screws that hold the bank of switches in place.

Of course now it drops down -- but only as far as the gazillion wire bundles beneath allow it to drop.   After much cursing and praying, I was able to access the little screws on the back of the split landing light switch, and install the Pulsar wiring.

Upon reassembly, we discovered that our Pulsar's wiring was only about 9 inches long.  This would only allow for installation directly beneath the landing light switch, on the co-pilot's side of the cockpit.  Since the box has two switches and an indicator light that must be reached (and seen) from the PILOT'S side, this didn't seem optimal. 

The solution?  Add on about 6 inches of wiring to all four wires, of course.  A simple, easy task.

My normally well-equipped A&P only had red wire in stock.  Being the frugal guys we are, we decided to simply use red wire on ALL the wire extensions, and carefully label them.  After much soldering/insulating/shielding/shrink-wrapping/labeling, I climbed back under the panel (where I had now spent waaay too many hours) and started carefully wiring the newly-extended wires back into the plane.

You guessed it: Somehow my mechanic had managed to mislabel the wires.  I carefully hooked them up as labeled, and instantly fried the unit.

Of course, I didn't know this at the time.  All I knew was that the damned thing was only blinking the left landing light.  Thus ensued several hours of trouble-shooting, as I repeatedly re-wired the unit, checking connections, and making the right (but not left) landing light blink, and so on.

Upon careful re-evaluation of the wires, my friend and A&P sheepishly admitted that he had mislabeled our home-made wiring harness. Leaving to go to his day job, I was left with the task of figuring out if hooking up the wires backwards had done permanent damage to the unit.

Luckily a good friend (who works at Rockwell-Collins as an avionics tech) happened by, and using a multi-meter he was able to determine that the unit was, indeed, dead. 

I reluctantly called AvTek Mike again, and I let my friend talk "Tech Talk" with him.  After a few minutes, these two diode-heads determined that we had, in fact, blown out the unit, and Mike patiently explained what I had done by wiring it backwards.  (It was technical -- I don't remember...)

He gracefully told me to return it to him (again!), and that he would repair it, free of charge.   He also agreed to add an extra 9 inches of wire to the harness (for ease of installation), and to install quick-disconnect plugs on the wires, so that I could remove the unit easily in the future.

Ten more days rolled by, and I once again found myself under the panel, with the wiring just the right distance so that my progressive bifocals were useless.  I *could* see without my glasses, out to about 6 inches from my eyes.   Unfortunately, all the wiring was about 8 inches from my face, so I couldn't see a damned thing, and....

Why I'm Not an Avionics Tech

....I didn't realize that AvTek Mike had crimped the quick-connector plugs on differently -- one wire was female-male, while the other two were male-female.  I'm sure he did this so that I couldn't possibly connect the wires wrong (again!), but he never counted on a blind, stupid guy working under the panel.  So, I simply took the connectors off the wires, and started crimping them on the wires under the panel, in preparation for hooking the unit up..

Imagine my horror to discover that the white and black wires couldn't hook up!  They were male-male, and female-female.  (I had gotten lucky with the red wires -- they were correct.) 

And, of course, I had crimped them on super-hard, so that they could NEVER come accidentally undone...  No way was I gonna be able to cheat and re-use them. Augh!

Laying in a pool of my own sweat, cursing everything and everyone in the universe, didn't help.  I was going to have to cut the wires and install new quick-connectors.  Extricating myself from under the panel for the umpteenth time, I simply couldn't believe how stupid this whole thing had become.  I had now paid an A&P an hour's time, plus spent the better part of two days working on what AvTek Mike bills as a "20 minute job". 

Oh, well.  Thirty minutes later, with new quick-connectors installed properly and all the wiring neatly zip-tied up, the job was finally complete.  Turning on the aircraft master switch and flipping on the Pulsar's toggle switch, my in-wing landing lights instantly started wig-wagging.   Pushing the "Speed Button" caused the wig-wag effect to go faster.  Flipping on the wing-tip strobe lights, the plane suddenly looked for all the world like a UFO, or a Boeing 747.  NO ONE was going to miss our plane in flight!

Epilogue

Of course, knowing what I know now, I could probably install the unit in a couple of hours.  Mike's claim of "20 minutes to install" is hopelessly optimistic -- it takes longer than that to remove the seats from a Cherokee -- but it really IS a straight-forward installation that only bad luck and a blind hotelier could screw up.

It remains to be seen how durable the unit is, but the remarkable visual effect certainly can't be disputed.  The wig-wagging landing lights, when combined with the strobes, makes any aircraft stand out against the sky, no matter what the weather conditions. 

I'm looking forward to many years of great service, and can only thank AvTek Mike for his patience and help during this installation.  He never asked for an extra nickel, even with all the back and forth mailings, and he happily fixed the unit even after I admitted wiring it up backwards. 

THAT is customer service!

Here are a couple of pix of the finished installation:

Here's a close up of the control box, mounted below and to the left of the throttle quadrant	A longer view -- it's a nice, small box that can be mounted anywhere. This spot only required moving the microphone holder (that we never use)...