It’s nice to have enough painting done so that I can start putting things together again. This morning I started with the firewall. When I painted the fuselage, I just balled up the wiring and wrapped it in a plastic bag. Today I untangled that big ball and started reconnecting the connections on the firewall. I disassembled the instrument panel, which involved removing the avionics racks from the panel blank itself. Those were drilled to #40 size and held together with clecos, so I drilled them to final size and deburred the holes.
I’ve never been very happy with Dynon’s mount for the HS34. The problem is that the holes are already drilled in the flange. The shape of the bracket makes it impossible to match drill the bracket to the instrument panel, which in turn makes it impossible to get a good hole location in the panel. If the flange were not drilled at all, then I could drill from the panel side and everything would match up. While I was at the Sebring LSA expo back in January, we had stopped by the Dynon booth to look at their displays, and I noticed that their display panel had a box-style mount for the HS-34. I was immediately excited and asked where I could buy one. It turns out that the mount is actually the one that they sell for the autopilot module, and I was able to order one.
The AP74 mount will require some modification in the back to make room for the connector, but I’ll do that later.