Total nightmare

Today was the big day when my Savannah’s new instrument panel was supposed to be all done-and-dusted, installed and working. I thought that with all the preparatory work I’d done it would be a fairly straightforward matter to get everything connected up and the complete panel installed but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first thing I found was that, as I’d suspected, the panel with most of its gauges etc mounted, missing just the airspeed indicator, fuel pressure gauge and a few switches, was unwieldy and difficult to line up and hold in position in order for its missing items and all of its connections to be installed. The very real danger was that if it was allowed to topple onto the floor of the aircraft real, and expensive, damage might be done to it.

The easy solution to that was to place my toolbox on the floor of the cabin with several wooden blocks on top of it to bring the panel up to about the correct height. The problem, of course, was although I removed the tools that I thought I might need, I then kept needing others that were still in the box and inaccessible. Here are a few shots showing what I mean.

But that wasn’t the main problem. As soon as I came to connect up the gauges and switches I found that the wiring under the dashboard just wasn’t long enough to reach the panel. I couldn’t remember everything being so tight when I removed the old panel, but whoever had done the wiring work previously had not only cable-tied everything very tightly indeed but had also made it all into a terrible tangle.

The following picture gives an indication of how little space there was between the new panel and the instrument dash, hardly enough to be able to get my hands behind the panel, and the wiring was still too short to reach most of the gauges and switches that needed to be connected.

By the time I’d realised just how bad things were I’d already installed and connected up the switches and gauges on the pilot’s side of the panel, and with some difficulty because of the limited space in which to work. And I was also very concerned the whole time about the possibilty of damaging the new radio and transponder by bashing them and dragging them against the metal of the panel surround.

This last shot shows how far I got before calling it a day, clearing up and heading for home in a not very positive frame of mind!

I’m going to have to think about how to proceed tomorrow because it’s clear that I can’t continue as I’m doing. I don’t want to have to remove the panel and start all over again and my initial thought is to pull the panel as far forward as I can, get underneath it and try to cut all of the cable ties that are currently securing the wiring.

Freeing it up should, I hope, give me the amount of clearance that I’ll need but I won’t know until I give it a go. If it doesn’t work, the only alternative will be to start all over but that could turn into a fairly major undertaking and I’d like to avoid it at all costs if I can.