Well, after nearly 6 months of down-time, N131JF returned to the skies just after 7.00pm last night.
I received the repaired intercom from Spruce just over a week ago. A quick test by plugging it into the wiring harness proved that it worked!
That was the easy part. The more intricate part was completing the installation and buttoning everything up in the plane. That took some time, with some more help from Jesse.
There were several little things that needed to be fixed/optimized along the way. One issue was that several wires in the intercom harness had been inadvertently routed across wires running down to the rear of the plane. This made it impossible to cable-tie the latter set of wires in their original position, so we had to re-route several wires (cutting and re-joining a couple of them along the way).
All of the wiring bundles had to be re-tied throughout the plane. Additionally we were able to further reduce the height of the wiring bundle leading to the Molex harness connector on the intercom. This allowed us to fit the top of the intercom case to the bottom half of the case (although we did need to enlarge the hole through which the wiring harness enters the side of the case). This improves shielding and protection, and also ensures that the Molex connector cannot come away from the intercom, since the wiring harness and Molex connector is being pressed down in place by the top of the intercom casing.
I finally took to the skies just after 7.00 pm (see most recent posting for other information). The intercom works, but it requires some adjustment using the onboard pots. The main issue is that the noise reduction threshold is set too high, so the noise reduction is not currently kicking in. I will fix this prior to the next flight, probably by running a ground test with the engine running.