Floor Compartment

This thing is neat and necessary
and should be stock equipment and molded into the floor pan on both sides.

It's a neat little compartment and we felt it should be glassed in as we built the ship

The directions from RotorWay, unless I misunderstood them, are for a ship that's already built.

It has large flanges when it comes out of the box and from what i get from it all you cut a hole large enough for the box to insert into the floorpan and then fit the flanges to match the floorpan floor.  At that point you rivet it in place and then make the new heel plate, install the hinge on the front and wallah! you're in business.

We had already finished installing the floor pan heel plates when we ordered the compartment so we had to remove the old one and make a new one with out rivet holes in it.  We cut most of the flanges off the unit leaving about a 3/4 inch flange, then we cut the whole in the floor pan and fiberglassed it to the floorpan from the underside.  We now have rivet holes in the floorpan to deal with and need to fill from the old heel plate installation. We also have to fill the cracks where the new compartment doesn't meet the floorpan on the inside of the box where the flanges meet the floorpan.

All that aside we likes it Good!  To mount the heel plate to the hinge we used rivets and then knocked out the pins and peened them as flat as we could so it could come down to meet the floor pan.  We still had to notch out the floorpan so the hinge could recess to allow the heel plate to meet flush with the floor.

We fiberglassed a 90 degree piece of fiberglass to the front of the box to attach the hinge to the floorpan as you can see by the photographs.  All in all were real happy with the installation. 

In the electrical section you'll see the rest of the story, as good ole Paul Harvey says lol,

we came up with something else to use this box for aside from using it for miscellaneous junk storage.