At the back of the cabin (behind the rear seats), a horizontal baggage shelf and vertical vanity panel have to be fabricated. For the baggage shelf I used 3/8″ divinycell foam and two layers of BID on each side. For the other parts, a single layer of BID is all that’s needed.

First I used cardboard to determine the basic shape. At first, I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with the transverse bulkhead and aileron cables. In the end, I decided to create small “boxes” cover that.

Here you can see the shelf, vanity panel and the front-to-rear parts of the boxes made from cardboard.

Then I used the cardboard templates to cut the shelf and main vanity panel. I cut them a little big and sanded them down to fit.

In this picture, I have the two sides of the boxes bonded together. I decided to angle the sides because… why not?

And finally with the boxes finished. The green tape was just a g   uide to let me locate them in the same place while testing the fit.

I bonded aluminum angle to the sides and bolted a piece across the back of the gear bulkhead to make the mounting brackets for the shelf. This is the only part that will be screwed down. All the other pieces will be velcroed. in place.

There’s a philosophy which says to make the vanity panel easily removable so that if the main landing gear doesn’t come down that I could go back and gain access to the gear mechanism. I just don’t know about climbing back there (in flight) to fix a landing gear problem. The risk management part of me says that rarely (if ever) has anyone been injured landing gear up.  But there are many instances where people have died messing around with landing gear.

So I haven’t decided about hinging the top of the vanity panel to access the gear mechanism. The vanity panel won’t be installed until I have many hours on the plane anyway.