The day has finally come to put the panel together! I'd love to be able to route all of the wires before anything is on the panel and there's a lot of space to work with, but it's too hard to know exactly where everything will set. I screwed the panel to the longeron brackets and then screwed the audio panel tray in (screws/nuts). The tray for the backup battery and comm transceiver went in next.
The brackets for the audio panel tray stiffen the panel up quite a bit, but the top still has a considerable amount of give when pushing on it, like you would do when pushing the buttons on the radio or autopilot panels. Since the panel is already painted, the last thing I want to do is put more screws through it, so I decided to make some stiffeners out of aluminum angle attached to the subpanel and the top reinforcement of the panel. I countersunk the screws on top - the glare shield sits down flush on it when the canopy is closed. This really stiffened up the panel, and as an added bonus it gives me more places to attach wires routed from one side of the panel to the other. I had to cut off a big chunk of the angle of the stiffener on the right side to allow clearance for the Dsub that goes into the autopilot panel. Not ideal, but also not really a big deal given that this isn't a part that will really handle much stress at all.
Then the fun part came that I've been waiting months for! I put everything in place and locked it down with black button head screws. I have to admit, it looks pretty cool! It's especially cool to know that I did it all myself, whereas most people these days just pay a shop to make the panel, from cutting to labeling and wiring. The only thing of note that I'm not sure about is the fit of the audio panel. It was very tight going into the tray and is canted just a tiny bit, meaning I got the tray angled down just a little bit. I know it can go in perfectly straight since it was when I first fit the panel. I may pull the panel out tomorrow and loosen up all of the screws of the tray to see if I can tilt it back to level.
The remaining things to do are to install the headphone jacks (wired into the audio panel by AFS, so I couldn't put them in before installing the audio panel tray) and 3D print a cover to go where the future IFR GPS will go. I also need to route the cabin heat control from the heater box up to the panel.
Once everything is in place, the space fills up pretty quick! Routing wires is going to be interesting.
