Busy day with assorted stuff, but I got a little bit of time in. I hadn’t yet reinstalled the components mounted on the baggage bulkhead, so I got that stuff in place. This also involved reworking my stacked mount for the EMS and ARINC interface, since previously I decided to reverse the orientation of those. There was also the question of where to mount the Aithre CO detector; I figured out the general area but didn’t work on getting the holes drilled yet. I also reinstalled the hard brake lines from the gear towers to just above the rudder pedals, along with the ducting from the cabin air inlet to the vent in the panel.

One thing I looked at a bit was where to mount the converters needed for my capacitive fuel level sensors. I’m pretty sure I want to mount these on the side skins near the fuel tanks, but I’m not exactly sure where. I think, for the purposes of wiring, I’ll probably just run the wires for these to the general area, and leave enough extra material to finish the connections out once I have the tank mount stuff in place.

Other remaining housekeeping stuff to do is to figure out how to do the plug for the removable rear stick, as well as finalizing routing for the wires to the seat heaters, particularly the rear seat. Oh, and I need to figure out what power plugs I’m going to use and get those ordered, so I can get them mounted. Gotta figure out where the wire drops for those will be…

OK…time to get back towards wiring harness stuff. But first there was that pesky ELT switch that I totally forgot to mount before. Fortunately, I figured out yesterday that I had room for it on the right sub panel, so tonight I got that hole laid out, cut, and the mount holes drilled. That done, it was time to start putting stuff back together again. So as of now, I’ve got both the shelves back in place, and all the stuff installed in the panel again. Which, of course, means I can finally get a look at what my real-live panel will look like. Well, mostly, it’s still not painted or labeled…but anyway:

So yeah, a good couple hours’ work on a weekend. Next fun, I get to pull some string or ribbon or something all over the place to figure out the branch lengths for my harness diagram…and then things will really start to get fun.

No photos tonight, nothing especially cool to speak of. Most of the time was spent finishing the edges of the forward upper skin – filing off the little nubs from where I removed the unused sections, smoothing everything out, cleaning up the edges. I also deburred a few other remaining things that I hadn’t picked up yet, namely the baggage hinge support and spacer.

The other thing I wanted to get a bit ahead of was figuring out where to mount the ELT remote switch. I started trying to sort of visually estimate the fit of the switch on one of the panel wings, but it was far from obvious whether or not it would fit. So I ended up using some scrap to make a little rectangular plate the size of the switch mount face, just so I could get a better idea of the fitment. That allowed me to see that yes, it’d fit over on the right panel wing just fine. Now I just have to actually make that hole…

Tonight I got straight to work with the riveting on the panel parts. First up were the nutplates, by which the center panel section will attach to the subpanel “wings.” Then I got to rivet the attach strip onto the subpanels; in this case, only some of the rivets are set, specifically omitting some near where the subpanels connect on the aircraft centerline. If all of these rivets were set, the entire assembly would be made rigid, and it’d be impossible to get it in and out of the aircraft…and I’m not ready for permanent mounting yet. If nothing else, these things need to be painted…

Next up was installing some stuff preparatory to fitting the forward upper skin. In addition to mounting the panel assembly in the aircraft, I also brought the roll bar back over and temporarily bolted it into place. 

With all that in place, it was time to break out the skin itself for fitting. The manual specifically calls for removing the vinyl covering on the inside, presumably because this is a tight fit and that extra material wouldn’t be very helpful. I just want ahead and removed all the vinyl, in keeping with my general practice of just ripping the stuff of and not keeping it on like some people do. Then this skin needed some trimming – I’d removed one of the portions a while back, for reasons I don’t even recall – this was the cutout section where the skin wraps around the roll bar. Tonight I also needed to remove the section where the baggage area door will be.

With that done, and with the baggage door support strips prepped and clecoed onto the skin, it was time to attach the thing to the structure. This was a bit tedious due to the thickness of the skin and the curvature involved, but nothing too awful. Just got to be liberal with the clecos to make sure everything sits good and flush.

That got me to a good stopping point for the night, so it was just time to take some photos. It’s kind of impressive to see in person just how sizable the forward baggage compartment opening is:

It actually extends beyond the aircraft centerline:

And just for more illustrative purposes, I temporarily installed the baggage compartment floors and such to show the space available up here, with one of my milk jug cleco holders for scale. Not bad at all:

I guess next up I get to do a bunch of match drilling, though there are also a few more small parts to be installed first.. Reading ahead in the manual, I’d be removing this skin not too long after doing that work, but in this case I think I’m going to leave it a bit longer. The reason for this is that my finish kit will be here in a few days, and I’d like to at least briefly lay the canopy on top of the fuselage so I can get an idea of what area of this skin will be inside the canopy. That’s of interest to me since I intend to install both a GPS antenna and a couple of cooling/defrost fans on the glareshield, and I want to make sure I have a good idea of the space available.

Besides, it’ll just look cool, and that’s important too.

More of the tedious stuff tonight. Most of what I did was just cleaning up all the rough edges on the panel components, and in this case it was kind of a worst-of-both-world situation: the panel attach strip (which joins the panel wings to the skins) has a whole lot of nooks and crannies, but at least it’s made of thin material. Meanwhile, the actual panel components have mostly long straight-ish edges, but the material is super thick. So basically this was just a good solid hour of filing, followed by some final edge polishing on the bench grinder where possible.

After finishing that up, I went ahead and countersunk all the flush rivet holes on the panel components. With that done, I’m all set to do some more riveting here…but that’ll be another night.