Oh look, another multi-day entry. This isn’t actually how I’d intended to do this, but I went to bed last night and completely forgot about writing this up. So yeah, anyway…yesterday was all about getting everything finished and topcoated. This involved a series of short work sessions over the course of the morning. First up was cleaning and relettering the main panel, then shooting the first coat of clear on it; at the same time, I shot the initial clear on the throttle quadrant parts from yesterday.

After giving those items a bit of time to flash, I moved them out into the sun in the hopes of speeding the curing up a bit. Unfortunately, while doing that, I saw that I’d gotten a little heavy with the clear on the quadrant parts, resulting in some crinkling. Those were going to need some more attention, unfortunately, but for the time being I left them in the sun and went back to shoot two-part clear on the switch console and panel wings.

While those were curing, I went back to the quadrant parts. My first thought was to try color sanding the clear to remove the crinkles; maybe there was a slim chance I could get away with doing that and then adding two-part clear on top. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the way things went; while I got the surface smooth by sanding, the clear was overly dull and even sanded through in a few spots. I decided to approach these by shooting yet another black coat on top, then just directly topping with two-part clear. There’s really no reason to add the intermediate single-part clear here, other then to be consistent with everything else…I didn’t think it was likely to affect the final finish.

So then there was just some more waiting for the black paint to set up a bit, before I finally went back and shot the two-part clear on the remaining parts – namely, the main panel and those pesky quadrant parts. By this time it was approaching midday and starting to get good and hot outside, so I switched to indoor activities for the rest of the day. I really wanted to start reassembling things, but it seems like poor judgment to not give the clear coat more time to cure – the can says it needs 24 hours to fully dry. No point in putting all this work and then mucking up the finish out of impatience.

So I picked back up around midday today, starting out with reinstalling all the switches in the console. I also spent some time last night thinking about how I wanted to color-code the switches. Way back when, I added colored switch covers which I wanted to use to visually differentiate things in addition to the labeling. So after getting all the switches back in place, I added the covers for good measure:

What I basically settled on for a system (and I use that term loosely) was:

• Yellow: lighting
• Red: things that shouldn’t normally be on – in addition to the alt feed above, the start arm switch also gets one of these
• Blue: fuel pump (because 100LL is blue) (not seen above)
• Green: ignition (because green means GO) (also not seen above)
• White: everything else

Finally, I started thinking about other admin tasks before replacing the panel. The first things I wanted to look at were the gear tower brake lines. I want to modify these to use different holes in the floor, in order to better work with connecting to the fluid passages in the gear legs. I also need to remove and clean these anyway; I unwisely left them uncovered and they’ve got mud dauber nests that need to be cleaned out. All of this is best taken care of now, with the panel not in the way and the fuselage not on the gear. Unfortunately, full-size combination wrenches are too big for working down in the bottom of the towers, so I’m going to need to pick up some stubby wrenches before I can keep going here.

So instead I turned to remaking the network cable between the baggage bulkhead and the main panel. Previously, I made this too short, not allowing for sthe same service loop length that I have with the main harness. So I got to dust off my electrical stuff and remember the pinouts for a Skyview network cable.

All in all that made for a pretty good day’s work. Tomorrow I may do some more cleanup behind the panel (everything is dusty from sitting out uncovered) and maybe start working on installing the wear plates and other preliminary stuff for the gear. I think I also need to pull the gear legs themselves out and flush out those passages – if I recall correctly they got uncovered at some point and got some mud dauber attention. Better to clean that out before I install them…

So last time out I’d gotten the flat black base coat shot on all the panel parts, and was waiting on the two-part clear I ordered. That came in this week, and I’d kind of wanted to test with it, but the thing to think about is that these two-part rattle cans aren’t good forever. Once you combine the two parts, there’s a limited amount of time to use the paint before it cures in the can – in this case, they say 48 hours. With that in mind, I needed to carefully time things, so I waited until the weekend to really get started. The only thing I got done earlier this week was to shoot the first coat of single-part clear on my test coupon.

Today after work, though, I got going on things. I cracked the first can of two-part clear and shot a top coat on my test coupon, and while that was curing, I got started on applying the actual labels. I figured that worst case, the test coupon wouldn’t go well, but I could still shoot the initial top coat on the panel pieces.

I started with the main panel section, which only needed my tail # top center. The one downside to this application is positioning is a little prickly. All the other labels center up on switch mount holes, so positioning takes care of itself, but here I needed to set up some guides to get the label where I wanted. After some thinking, I put down a couple masking tape lines, so that the text itself would fit between them with only a little extra space – easy enough to center up. After that, the letters went on nice and easy, and I was happy – until I carelessly removed my tape guides and they pulled up some of the black paint. I thought I could just re-shoot the black in that area, but the spots where the paint had come up were obvious. After a couple different attempts to salvage the panel, I ended up stripping all the paint off and starting over again. Mildly annoying, but I want to get this right from the start.

In the meantime, I moved on to other spots. After the previous issues, I was a lot more careful with the tape – while I didn’t need guide lines anywhere else, I did still need a bit of tape to hold the label backer in place while I transferred things. But with that extra care, I had no more issues with paint coming up, and everything went on quite nicely:

After applying all the labels, I went ahead and shot the single-part clear on all those parts; I figure I’ll let that set up overnight before doing the final two-part topcoat. I put the main panel under a heat lamp to try and fast-cure the black, and my plan is to apply the letter again first thing in the morning, shoot the first clear coat, and then come back and topcoat everything after a couple hours cure time.

The other thing I wanted to do was to come back and topcoat the throttle quadrant parts that I sprayed flat black some time ago. These pieces don’t have any lettering, but I wanted to topcoat these parts with clear like everything else, for consistency of the final finish. They needed some cleanup after having been on the shelf for a while, and there seemed to be some crud in the paint as well, so I ended up giving them a light scrub and a fresh coat of black as well; they’ll get the same treatment tomorrow as the main panel.

So, assuming everything goes well tomorrow, I should have all of my first round of labeling done, complete with top coating, and ready to go back into the plane. The only other thing I want to get done before that is to remake one network cable, which I made too short the first time around – it doesn’t have the service loop length required for me to be able to pull the panel for maintenance.

Finally, in other big news, my engine came this past week, and is now merrily sitting on a pallet in the hangar. So now I’m really thinking in terms of a punch list before I get the gear legs mounted, and I may very well do my first engine hanging not too long after that.

This is yet another one of those composite updates. I haven’t had a good long work session all week, but I’ve been trying to make a habit of doing some small thing each night – the age-old “touch the project every day” adage. This week, I’ve been continuing to get ready for doing the panel labeling.

Earlier this week I cut a couple test coupons from scrap to use for labeling experiments. Basically, I want to test my methodology for top coating things once the labels go on. I want to cover the labels with a good two-part clear coat, but I’ve read of builders who discovered that such a clear coat started dissolving the dry-transfer letters! Seems the best fix is to first spray a light coat of single-part clear, and then add the two-part on top for durability. In any case, I’m definitely trying this out on scrap before going to the real thing.

Also this past week, I took out the switch console and instrument panel parts, and removed all the components to get ready for painting. The main panel and console got cleaned and scuffed yesterday, while the panel wings needed a little more attention – I need to clean up some ugly marks on those before paint. And today, after a day full of events, I was able to go ahead and shoot primer and flat black on the panel and console. I figure I’ll let those cure for a few days before I do anything else – besides, I still have my top coat experiments to do.

In other news, my printed labels arrived today. I had a great experience with Luann at imagetransfers.com. Turns out the stuff I exported from my long-running Photoshop panel planner were not the right stuff for printing, but she asked me for the original PSD files and was able to recreate them as the vector art she needed – at no cost to me. Between that and having the labels in hand the same week, I’m pretty happy.

So the other fun today was doing a couple test applications on one of my test coupons. Everything on my label sheet has at least one duplicate to allow for mistakes and do-overs, plus as printed there’s some extra text – plenty of material for experimentation. The labels go on really easily, and look great. Now I just need to get the clear coat I need for top coating:

So I’ve been in a sort of odd-job space when I’ve had time to work on the project, and tonight was yet another pivot from recent stuff. The main panel/switch console layouts, complete with labeling, have been established for a while, but I haven’t yet followed through in making the labeling happen. I’ve been intending for a while to just go with custom-printed dry-transfer labels for this, and I’ve decided that finishing up this labeling is a good digestible mini-project to take on.

The one thing I got to think about was potential labeling for the stick grip functions. At one point I’d planned on having a small reference diagram on the panel, but in the end I couldn’t find a good spot for it. It’s possible I could get away without labeling here, but some DARs are known to be sticklers about this…and being realistic, having the labeling is a good fallback in case anyone else flies the aircraft for whatever reason.

With that in mind, I decided to explore putting dry-transfer labels on the stick grips as well. The top of the grip seemed like a good spot for most labels, and to get a true trial I modified and then printed the label document I’d put together some time ago. I made sure everything had printed at the proper scale, cut out the pertinent parts, and just taped them in place to get a preview. I think this should work pretty well (the final labels will be white text, of course, and much more carefully positioned):

The one thing that doesn’t work for the top location is the autopilot disconnect on the side of the stick, but a one-line label fits nicely here as well:

And since I’d printed out the switch label layouts at the same time, I figured I’d trial fit that part as well. The idea is that when I apply these, I’ll cut out the whole strip and apply the entire console at once, which is only possible if the circles (which represent switch holes and won’t actually get applied in the end) line up with the holes. Looks pretty good to me:

My final act of the night was to finish off my label document, get it properly exported, and place the order for the labels. With any luck, those may get here by the end of the week, and maybe painting/finishing the panel and console can be a project for the next week or so.