Day 181

Finished the antenna coaxial cables today! That sure feels good. Made all the connections for the junction box we made down in the bottom of the plane. Probably wouldn’t do that again. It was quite a bit of work. We did it because when we were running the cables from the antennas we were unsure of where they went up in the avionics shelf. So we terminated the wires in the bottom thinking we would run cable from the respective avionics down to the junction spot. It worked perfectly as we envisioned, but probably wouldn’t do it that way again if we had it to do over. It looks great though. We got it all clamped and zip tied up.

We decided to tackle the dashboard and panel today as well. This was a big dusty mess and troublesome job. It ended up turning out perfectly, though. We had been thinking for a while now how we’re we’re going to make this work. We knew it needed to be trimmed to make the panel fit inside the dashboard. However it has to be done without damaging the upholstery that is already been installed when it comes to us. We decided to use a grinding disk to trim the fiberglass. This gave us the most control over what was being trimmed and if you spun the disk towards the inside it would fold the upholstery over and not cause it to tear on the edges.

The most difficult section to trim out was were the switches are. There is just not enough of a lip at the bottom to facilitate two of the holes to have rivet nuts installed. So these will have to have bolts with a big washer and nut on the back and sandwich the panel on. Once we got the bottom of the panel it fit we then could take a marker and slowly mark the back side where there was interference. We would then trim of very small amounts and then refit the panel, continuing to make small adjustments and only make small trims at a time. It was a little painstaking because there is no room for errors for how tightly the panel fits inside the dash. It paid of in the end though. We have a custom dash panel that fits perfectly now. All that is left is to clear drill out the mounting holes and install rivet nuts. That way it is all ready for when the dash gets installed.