I carefully cut, cleaned and painted the two halves of my new main cockpit panel and mounted a monitor behind the holes cutout for the main gauges. That went easier than expected. But I had to cut a channel in the back of the panel to run the encoder wiring for the OBS, VOR and barometer adjustment knobs on the front side. Using the Makerbot, I printed nice, shiny bezels to fit into the instrument panel holes, all created using Fusion 360.
Due to the overwhelming amount of new wiring of components, I decided to use the basement floor to begin soldering it all together. My original goal was to use nice, clean multi-pin connections for each instrument panel, but I didn’t bother to make custom circuit boards as that would have taken way too much time. After 8 total hours of soldering and a sore back from awkwardly bending over to cut, solder and crimp all the cabling, I finally completed it. Here’s some work in progress below. In an upcoming post, I’ll demo the final semi-completed panel.
