APG-70(V) Radar panel rebuild is complete!
This took a completely unacceptable time to finish. 🙁 I tore down the original panel probably close to three years ago. Life and other projects conspired to push work on the F-15C to the background. Yesterday (9/19/20) I got out of bed with my task for the day to get this panel knocked out. I didn’t get it done in a single day, but damn near. 🙂
I disassembled the APG-70(V) radar panel and stripped down all the switches of the original wiring and carefully de-pinned the Cannon connector. I worked out the connection positions on the switches and got new leads attached. When I originally started this rebuild, I got as far as a single switch and then SQUIRREL!…
Here’s what the panel components look like prior to final assembly:
And after installing & pinning the interface connector:
The channel selector is kind of a neat switch. It consists of two 8 position rotary switches. The first is labeled “A” through “H” and the second is “1” through “8”. The switches are BCD – Binary Coded Decimal. There’s a common wire on each and then three terminas, “1”, “2”, and “4”. Those three wires in combination can represent 8 different switch positions.
Now the back plate gets mounted. In rewiring the panel, it uses 52 pins on the original Cannon connector:
Now it’s ready for the edge-lit panel and knobs to be installed. Maintainers may spot a problem in this view. 🙂
This particular APG-70(V) radar happens to be serial number 0009…
With the knobs back on…
Finally, here it is with the rear shell cover back on:
Here’s a pile of the extra bits that I didn’t need…
The next thing I need to do is craft the wiring harness that connects the APG-70(V) panel to the main bulkhead Cannon plug. I’m going to look into either building or buying some kind of automated wire measuring/cutting tool. There’s 52 wires for this panel – it makes for a very tedious work session when most of your time is consumed by measuring and cutting wire…
BTW, if anyone knows how to force WordPress to stop imposing 1:1 aspect ratios on images, please let me know in the comments.
