spent the better part of 6 hours (!) freeing the pins out of their 2 respective sockets using the typical sub-d connector removal tool
When I am making up some harness on the bench I use high grade solder bucket connectors, solder them, and heatshrink over the pins. With proper stress relief on the cable, this is really good and less hassle than crimping where the pins can cost a fortune.
Yes Peter, just following Garmin’s recommended practices 
OTOH crimping sure is easier than soldering… it’s just the unpinning that’s is a major thing…
Another reason I prefer soldering is that crimp pins are all different and have to match the connector body by vendor P/N exactly. You can’t mix them and if you have to change a pin years later you probably can’t get another one (unless it is a Positronic super-pricey one) so you end up pushing that pin out, soldering a wire to it and pushing it back into the hole. Or leaving the pin in the connector and cutting the wire off and joining onto the wire (with a heatshrunk solder joint).
GA avionics use crimping for good practical reasons, one of which is a near total lack of soldering skill
GA avionics use crimping for good practical reasons, one of which is a near total lack of soldering skill
True, but the main reason is that aviation’s (not only GA) avionics are subject to continuous vibrations… rigid solder connections will crack. Flexible crimped ones may, later.
Sub-D, or hi density, whatever vocabulary is used for those pins, are surprisingly standardized. As an example that VM1000 i’m replacing dates back to 2001. The new EMS uses the same pins, which warranted the effort in this very case only, as cutting them off/replacing would have all wires too short. As usual, find the devil is to be found in the detail 
Some more RV fun this weekend.
G-LILB is a Lindy award winning RV3, with exceptional build quality throughout.
I think that’s the first time I’ve seen two RV-3s belonging to the same owner together in an air-air photo shoot
RV-3s are cool… A hangar neighbor here has one of those and an RV-6 to cover all his flying needs. He built both of them twenty years apart. Mostly he flies the RV-3 because of its incredible performance on 150 HP (2500 fpm climb with CS prop IIRC) but the RV-6 with its new panel is pulled out for passenger flying and once a year to Oshkosh. His wife recently bought a C182 but so far he has sworn it off, it’s “her plane”
My son recently received an Airfix kit of a Mk.1a Spitfire for his fourth birthday (“not suitable for children under 8 years of age”).
Today was RA OVC001 so we built it with a bit of help from my daughter. It went surprisingly well, with them identifying which parts to cut out, then putting glue on the surfaces. The cockpit section was very fiddly to put together, but we got there in the end. They did the bulk of the painting, and I just tidied up the edges and did the fiddly bits like the transfers.
I don’t think we’ll start an RV just yet
