Instrument Panel

This bad boy was something I was dying to get to, all those cool instruments, lol.

In mounting it to the pod it's a real bugger to get set properly.  You'll need bunches of clamps of different varieties and also you'll have to grease the back of the panel to keep the resin from sticking to it.  We used white grease to do that.

At first it looks like you'll have to angle the panel back into the pod to allow it to be straight but after a short call with Tom Smith at Rotorway I found out you don't.  The panel will bow itself at the FADEC readout unit hole and make it fit just right.  One trick we did here was not hard mount the FADEC readout unit.  We let the rear mount flex somewhat and it works great. 

Be sure to not get carried away sanding out the hole because if you go too much the FADEC unit will slide right on though the hole.

We didn't like the way RotorWay had us install the unit with the little fiberglass angle pieces because we had to be very careful when we punched any of the buttons on the unit because it would easily push back into the pod, very poor design here. 

You can see by the pics, we made a box behind it and when you tighten up the screws, you do it until the unit is snug and no more. 

Later while I was at John Spurling's I saw a ship belonging to Chris Stevens. He or John one simply split the FADEC case in half and sandwiched the panel with it. Looked like a good way of doing it to me.

A boo boo we made here was to install the gauges that are supposed to be installed from the back side
from the front side like the altimeter and others. 
This was something we pondered on the weekend and thought it looked better with all the gauges on the outside of the panel instead of inside it.

 Once you make this decision in the direction we did, You can't go back
because you have to grind out metal for the adjustment knob on the altimeter gauge and the vinyl covering on the panel will have indentions in it.  One key thing in the decision was that if we put them in from the back the vinyl would come loose around the instruments like it does around the FADEC readout unit.

END