Well, for a second I thought I might still get away with it. The SL-10MS audio panel is about 6 1/4" deep, so theoretically it will clear, as you can see here. The problem will be the wiring harness, which will undoubtedly extend back behind the audio panel for a couple of inches. It might work, but I doubt it. I'm going to assume that the ACS2002, which is only a couple of inches deep, will go at the top of the stack. This means that the radio stack will extend below the sub-panel, which isn't an ideal setup structurally...but I've been looking into the RadioRax system and am considering using something like that. I'll probably break down and just build my own tray support extension below the sub-panel. It won't be too difficult. Anyway, things are a-changin...it ain't over 'til the stuff is installed and powered up!
This morning I took advantage of the sunshine to paint the battery box and hold-down bar.
Once it was dry I riveted the mounting brackets to the sides using a longeron yoke and a C yoke in the pneumatic squeezer. After that I riveted the nutplates to the brackets.
Here I have just clecoed the box to the firewall. Looks pretty small, huh? Yeah, well the Odyssey PC680 battery is pretty tiny. It's really a motorcycle/ATV battery, but it provides enough juice to crank over an IO-360-A1B6, and it will put out 17 amp-hours when healthy.
By the way, I ordered the PC680 this morning from Sunn Battery in Florida. I had been shopping around for the cheapest source. Van's sells the PC680, but they charge about $100 or something. The cheapest source I could find was Batteries4Everything.com, but they're in California (which means I would pay sales tax), they tack on a handling fee, and they ship UPS. Ordering from Sunn Battery was the best deal, even though the price itself was slightly higher, since there was no sales tax, no handling fee, and they fix the shipping cost at $5.50. It worked out to $80.09 door-to-door. Can't really beat that.
For what it's worth, I did consider going with a Panasonic P174-ND (17ah) or P231-ND (20ah) from Digi-Key. Those suckers are about half the cost and basically the same form factor. The problem is that the form factor isn't perfectly identical...very slightly different dimensions and different terminals, from what I hear. And a bigger issue (for me) is that the internal resistance of those batteries is higher (12 and 11 milliohms respectively) than the PC680 (7 milliohms). While a P174-ND would make a good "bench" battery, it's not what I want in my plane. Food for thought in case you're considering these.
Ok, back to the canopy construction. Today I finished the side latch mechanism. These are the little steel links that transition the force from the beam idler to the latch weldment. It's not a straight shot between those two points, so these links need a bit of an "S" bend and also a tiny bit of twist to get 'em to fit perfectly. I just bent and twisted them with a hand seamer in the vise.
Here you can see the steel links are in place. Now to fabricate the pushrod...
I cut the 5/8" tubing to length and drilled about 2" deep with a 13/64" bit on each end. Then I reamed each end out to #3 (.2130) prior to tapping the ends for the threaded rod end and clevis.
With the tubing clamped in the vise I tapped 1/4-28 threads into each end.
Here's the pushrod installed, adjusted, and working. This is the latched position.
And here's the unlatched position...you can see the finger is pulled forward.
I know I said I was going to leave the latch mechanism unprimed and unpainted since it looks cool, but I can't bring myself to leave steel parts alone. They'll be oxidized before you know it (around here). So I primed the steel links. I also primed my flap pushrods while I was at it. Those suckers had been hanging around for a while.
I broke down and painted the steel links with a flat white enamel. I may go ahead and paint the idler and pushrod white as well. We'll see.
