(Note: as I’m writing this, I’m watching updates from the Mars Curiosity Rover landing)

For the landing gear electrical and control, I purchased the control unit and selector from Wayne Lanza at Composite Designs. This is one of those decisions where I made the call to buy something rather than design it and build it myself. Wayne components are in a LOT of Velocities and the quality of the product is excellent.

I installed the control unit in the nose a few months back and have just been holding the selector in my hand when operating the landing gear. I have, up until now, held off on any decisions regarding instrumentation. Other than a glass panel from Grand Rapids Technology. I decided on GRT because they cater to the experimental aircraft market, they have an excellent reputation for customer server and they are always innovating. Which is why I have held off on a decision. Since I have reached a point where I have to know specifics about the panel layout, I have made the decision to go with their latest, greatest system. The HRx with the 10.4″ screen. This provides all flight and engine information on a single screen along with synthetic vision (the ground is displayed as it actually appears), HITS (Highway In The Sky), weather, remote radios, remote transponder and a whole bunch of other features. I’ll have a separate write-up on the selection process later. I haven’t decided whether to go with two 10.4″ screens or a single screen with a 7″ android tablet as the backup. But for now, I have enough to proceed.

When I was at Oshkosh, Carlos gave me a couple full-size paper representations of the screen. So the first step is to position the primary screen. I started by locating the center (left-right) of the pilots position. From this I extended it to the instrument panel and drew a vertical line. This tells me the point that is directly in front of the pilot.

Then I marked the center of the display and aligned it with the vertical line and taped it to the panel.

Then I cut a piece of cardboard to the size of the landing gear selector and thought about where I wanted it to be.This is the part of building that can be really NICE! Think about… your car. And how the location of the radio bugs you. Well, there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. But I can put things like the gear selector ANYWHERE  I want.

But with great power comes great responsibility. 😉

So here’s something that must be considered: Where you’re landing, sometimes… you can’t. Another plane pulled out onto the runway, a deer just ran across the runway, or maybe you did a bad job in the approach and now you need to go around. The standard procedure is to go full power, start the climb and retract the landing gear. Now the stick is in my right hand so I don’t want to let go of that during a go-around. My left was used to firewall the throttle, prop and mixture so that hand is available. Which means raising the landing gear will need to be done with my left hand.

So that means somewhere in the red shaded area.

Of the three engine controls, the throttle (black) is primary. So my hand will be towards the top of the engine control quadrant. Moving my hand down and to the right to raise the gear is not optimal. So I decided to put the selector above the throttle.

I marked the location and removed the panel. Some people simply mount the selector panel on top of the instrument panel. But I decided to make it flush. So I cut a rectangular hole in the panel and sanded the edges until the front of the selector fit into the hole. Then I took some only fiberglass stock and cut a flange (or backing) that the selector would screw into. I used structural adhesive to attach that to the back of the instrument panel.

The selector is far enough to the left that the instrument panel mounting flange is behind the selector. But this isn’t really a problem. I just won’t make the flange all the way around the opening.

Once the flange (and panel mounting flange) was trimmed, I put everything back together and drilled the four holes for the screws that hold the selector in place. I could have used regular nuts on the back but that would require holding them when tightening the screws. So I decided to use nutplates.

The nutplates are held in position with rivets. The kit comes with pop-rivets… which I detest. I think they’re amateurish. I prefer solid rivets. Any job worth doing…  🙂

But in this case, my rivet squeezer wouldn’t fit for two of the rivets. So I had to fall back on pop-rivets. It’s not structural, so I can live with it.

Here’s the opening in the panel with the partial flange.

Looking at it from the back.

A regular nutplate wouldn’t work in the lower-left corner (which is on the instrument panel flange). I would need a one-arm nutplate… which I don’t have. Since this isn’t structural, I decided to cut one arm off a regular nutplate and forge ahead.

Then I put it all back together.