I spent some more time playing with the modular panel pieces tonight. There is a piece of angle that gets cut and riveted to the bottom edge of the panel frame to give it some stiffness, so I figured I'd work on that first.
I ran into a problem almost immediately, though. The plans show the angle being 34.5" long, but on my copy the dimension has been crossed out and 35.5" written in by hand, by persons unknown. Problem is, 34.5" is obviously too short (it wouldn't hit the holes on either end) and 35.5" is too long – it would interfere with the vents. I fired off an email to Affordable Panels to ask what's up.
Since I didn't get anywhere with the stiffener angle, I decided to cleco the panel into the fuselage to test the fit. The prepunched holes line up very nicely with the structure that I already built.
I climbed in to test the fit. The XL panel definitely yields less legroom than the stock Van's panel, but I still have a couple inches to spare and it's not uncomfortable at all. The nice thing about the lowered panel is that I think I could probably mount a throttle quadrant in way that makes it fall nicely to hand. Still haven't decided to go with a quadrant or push-pull knobs, though.
The top center of the panel frame is prepunched for regular K1000 two-ear nutplates. Once I clecoed the frame to the subpanel ribs, it was immediately obvious that the inboard ear on each nutplate would interfere with the rib. I decided to simply drill two extra holes in order to be able to use one-ear nutplates here. The unused holes in the middle will be covered by the panel plates.
The next problem was that the holes in the F-7103C angles I'd previously made didn't line up with the holes in the panel frame in all cases, and the flutes interfered with some of the other holes in the frame.
No big deal, I just made another set of angles from some extra stock I had laying around.
Thes new angles have flutes in places where there's no interference with any of the fastener holes. I'll drill the holes along the top next time I have the forward top skin on.
While I was in Colorado last week, I bought a couple of small canvas tool bags from the military surplus section at Jax. I have this idea that I'll put them in the unusable cargo area directly behind the seats, to hold on-the-road tools, emergency supplies, and so forth. Since I had one of the seats in anyway, I did a test fit. So far it looks like the bags are just about the perfect size to fit between the seatbelt anchors, seat back, and flap torque tube. Now I just need to find a suitable way to keep them from bouncing around the cockpit.
