February 20, 2005

Today, most of my day was spent working on panel stuff. I’m at a point now where I really should be getting it ready for finishing. So, I did some of the last few things I’ve been putting off for so long.

First thing I did was to finish up the glovebox. It needed a doubler plate for the power outlet and audio input sockets, so, here’s what I did. It didn’t need much really.

Next task was to remove the panel. Gulp! It’s been a while since this thing has been off the plane. Now I know why. It took me ages to get everything disconnected! Hopefully, this is the last time it’ll be off. While it’s off, I’m going to finish up stuff that can’t be done with the panel in place. I can tidy up my wiring runs, fix all the clamps and a couple of other bits and bobs. Here’s a shot with the guts of the panel hanging out all over the place.

Now that the panel is off, I can put in the keyboard connector for the EFIS 1. This allows a keyboard to be connected to the E1 so that you can do tech stuff like calibration, update maintenance (although you don’t even need a keyboard these days to update the software). I put the 9 pin DIN under the edge so it’s kind of out of sight.

Next was the mounting holes for the air vents. The main holes for the vents have been there for an eternity. Now I can finally make the rest of the holes. I decided that due to all the screws around these areas for the main panel stuff, that I’d only use two mounting screws for each vent. I think it’ll be OK. I had to get clever to centre the vents in the holes to get the mounting hole locations, but it turned out OK. I basically added tape until the vent was a snug fit. Here, the holes have already been drilled!

Here’s the vent sitting in there with the tape…

Since it was snowing like you wouldn’t believe (AGAIN!), I had to get home before dark to blow the snow off the driveway and pathways around my house. This Michigan weather is killing me. I wanna open a window and yell out at the top of my voice, “OK, ENOUGH ALREADY!” So far we’ve had about 4"-5" and it still hasn’t stopped.

Anyways, once I’d finished with the snow blowing, I decided to get on with finishing the inside of the glovebox. I bought some flocked sticky sheet from Edmund Scientifics. Search their site for the word flock, and it’ll come up. Turns out it’s used to line the insides of telescopes with! It wasn;t really too expensive at $9.95 for a 20"x30" sheet of the stuff. I was trying to find a company round here that could flock the actual box, but it was difficult. So, I decided to use the backup plan. It worked out pretty well, adheres extremely well, and is tough to get it in the deep box.

Here’s a shot of the box where the sockets are. The close up kinda shows what the flocking is like. Not bad eh?!