Let the Fun Begin!
The wait is indeed over. The large two crates with all the electronic equipment and structural parts for the cockpit recently got delivered. What an exciting day it was! We couldn’t bring the heavy crates directly into the garage, so we had to open and unpack them in the driveway.
The smaller crate included a lot of boxes stacked up like a very elaborate Tetris game. On the other hand, the larger one only had a few parts, but these were all the big and heavy pieces: rudder pedals, consoles with sidestick and tiller, overhead stand, as well as the sliding table and footrest for the captain side! After opening the crates it took a few hours to just move all the boxes and parts into the garage for temporary storage.
I was up at 6:30 the next day to start taking a full inventory…
Its amazing how many sub-panels go into building the overhead panel and the pedestal. All the electronics parts were well packaged to protect them from any damage. The same was true for the mechanical parts, protected by a good amount of bubble wrap and black shrink wrap film. The largest parts were securely screwed to the bottom of the crate to avoid any movement. I think I ended up with a pile of at least 100 wood screws after unpacking everything.
And now, where do I even start?
I kept the structural parts in the garage and moved all the electronics components in various rooms of the house. The dining table quickly filled up with all the parts for the overhead panel and the pedestal, with the exception of the throttle quadrant, which ended up in front of the fireplace (I thought that was a fitting location). Shortly thereafter the coffee table in the family room was littered with parts for the glareshield and other components of the MIP (Main Instrument Panel).
My plan for the next step is to test all the components individually before assembling them into their respective structure. I would hate to put everything together only to discover that a switch is not working or a cable is incorrectly connected to a panel. In parallel I will start assembling the metal structures for the pedestal, the overhead and the MIP…
I suspect I won’t have much time to publish blog posts for a while, so I have created a separate page to document my progress via pictures only. I intend to update that page frequently so don’t forget to check back from time to time!
