Joshua's RV-9A Project

This morning, spent a couple hours at the quarterly meeting of the Twin Cities RV Builders’ Group, chatting about planes and listening to stories.  Had the chance to visit Mike Behnke’s recently flying -9A and sit in the copilot seat.  A well done airplane.  Really liking his panel; even better in person than in pictures.  Playing with my paper cutouts, I figured that two AFS screens (my long-term plan) should be configured one on the pilot side, and one on the copilot side, with the radio stack in the middle.  Sitting in Mike’s cockpit (where both screens are in front of the pilot), I had no problem seeing both screens from the right seat–and since the displays share data and any screen can appear on any display, the right-hand display could be configured as the flight data screen if the copilot is flying.  He also still has room on the far right of the panel for a third display; I think an AFS 3400 would fit there, or a Dynon of some variety for dissimilar backup.  His panel is ~1 1/4″ longer than stock, but legroom didn’t seem to be an issue (I was able to sit with my knees bent up), and I think it might be possible to tighten things up a bit more, if a person was concerned about the panel length.

In the evening, Allison helped rivet the rest of the first pass on the top skin rivets.  After that, we fixed the few rivets that needed drilling out, and I pulled clecoes in preparation for the next session.  Also drilled out the rivets on the left wing that I squeezed into the holes intended for the root fairing screws…a stupid oversight of plans-reading on my behalf.  All those holes have also been dimpled, so I’ll be reading ahead in the manual to see whether that’s a problem, or if I need to flatten them out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Skin Panels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.