Phew!!

I finished off the new Savannah instrument panel fabrication work today and it was with a big sigh of relief I can tell you. It was tricky enough cutting all of the large instrument holes yesterday and you’d think that it would be a piece of cake drilling all of the smaller ones today. But that wasn’t the case, especially after the first two that I drilled got ‘messy’, but luckily not so much as will be visible when all of the instruments etc are installed.

There were two main problems – the first was that several holes and cutouts had to be shaped by hand and when you’re filing away, there’s always the chance that you’ll make a mistake and mess the whole thing up. Luckily that didn’t happen. The other thing is that several of the gauges have securing screw holes around their perimeter and if you don’t drill those in exactly the right positions, the gauges in question end up crooked ie not vertical. Luckily that didn’t happen either.

So I was very pleased to end up with something that will be quite presentable when it’s all finished and installed in the aircraft. It’s not perfect, but something made by hand, especially if that hand is relatively unskilled or inexperienced, is never going to be as perfect as an item made on precision machinery.

I stipped the protective film off the shiny ‘front’ face of the panel and then rubbed it down with fine wet-and-dry paper so I could then give it a coat of special aluminium primer. Unfortunately, I’ve only managed to find it here in brushable form and as I’ve had it for two or three years, it’s thickened up a bit as well. My idea is to give it a good thick coat of primer and then rub the brush marks out before spraying it to get a smooth satin finish, so I’ll have to see how things work out.

Here’s a shot of the ‘finished’ panel at the end of this afternoon.

In fact, I’ve realised that I’ve forgotten to drill the holes for the two screws that will hold the new 12V aux socket in and also the holes for the circuit breakers for the radio and transponder, but that won’t cause any problems. I’ll be taking the panel over to Malbec tomorrow to see how it fits and I’m hoping that after all my careful measuring it’ll drop straight in. Watch this space!