Before jumping into more of the panel tonight, I decided to do something I've been putting off for months and months. When I originally put the firewall insulation and stainless foil in place, I made a template and cut it to the exact size of the firewall. I THOUGHT that the cowl hinges that are riveted to the firewall flanges would be able to be put in place with the insulation trapped behind it. It turns out the insulation is just a smidge too thick, so it pushes the hinge out far enough that it can't be riveted where it needs to be. So all of that "get it the perfect size" energy was for nothing. The only option is to cut the insulation and foil away from the firewall flange about 1/8" so the hinge can slip back against the firewall. That seems like no big deal, but let me tell you, getting to the foil and cutting it with snips was nasty business! I finally got it inch by inch and then ran a wood dowel over the upturned and ragged foil edge to squish it back down. It's pretty ragged looking, but once I have the hinges riveted on with the top skin, a bead of fire barrier will cover the exposed edges and clean it up a bit.
Back to the panel. I finished up the shelf for the com transceiver and backup battery. I needed to see how far back the MFD display would project behind the panel to know where to locate the transceiver, so I put the MFD in place. It's starting to look like a real panel!
The MFD is fairly shallow, and also has a few inches on the bottom side, so I was able to set the transceiver relatively close to the panel underneath the bottom edge of the MFD. I needed to sneak it forward like that so I could also fit the battery on the shelf. The pictures are a little deceiving. It looks like the battery could have been slid further outboard, but if I did that it would trap the transponder on the subpanel in place. One thing I did do with the battery was flip it end on end so the cables come into it from the outboard side. It would have been nice to have them come in from the inboard side to make the run to the ACM shorter, but that would put them uncomfortably close to the center stack and make it all fit tighter than it needs to.
I connected the cables to the MFD just to verify I had clearance for everything. There's obviously a lot of cable management that's going to have to happen once everything is in place.
The switches are a combination of spade connectors, screws for ring terminals, and solder on (for the cheaper non-aviation specific stuff).
The ACM only has 4 ground pins in the connector for the switches. I would need 3 or 4 times that many if I grounded everything separately. I verified with AFS that the switches carry very little current, since they are just used to send the signal to the ACM, which then does the heavy lifting of opening and closing circuits (not all switches go through the ACM - the master relay and PMag switches work differently and carry the full loads). That means that I can combine a bunch of the grounds together to consolidate them on just a few of the connector's ground pins. AFS suggested daisy chaining switches together to cut down on the amount of wire needed. All of the center stack switches can easily share a single ground this way. I chained the center switches together, then started running the power wires as well. Unfortunately I ran out of spade connectors and had to stop. I had originally thought that most of the switches would need ring connectors, so I ordered a ton of those and very few of the spade connectors. Got that backwards! These connectors fit a lot tighter than the automotive ones I have, so I'm going to order more vs just grabbing some locally.
