The radio stack wiring took much longer than I anticipated. I finally got everything wired up though and I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I pulled an 11 hour day on Sunday because I wasnt leaving that shop until that panel was off of the bench and into the plane! I was a little surprised at how few wires I ended up having on the garmin 430 bracket considering the MASSIVE amount of possible pins that can be used.
I'm really excited to put the switches and other components in the panel. I have to wait for Brandi to finish our fiberglass panel overlay first though. Its almost ready and only needs to be trimmed up a little bit and then primed and painted.
For non aviation people - an ELT is an emergency location transmitter. It helps you get found if you ever went down and needed to be found. Originally I wanted to put the ELT remote buttons off the panel like maybe on the overhead or somewhere but we ended up deciding to put it on the panel centered above one of the skyviews. Since this was a last minute addition it didnt get a ton of thought put into it like most other aspects of the panel. So after I cut the hole and put the panel in, I noticed the hole I just cut was exactly in front of the rib of the sub panel. Ugh. We're going to have to trim that rib a tiny bit now because the ELT remote switch is about 2" long. Oh well, not a huge problem. Went ahead and ordered a 406MHz ELT today. The 406MHz are the 'new' technology, which transmit a GPS location instead of just broadcasting a signal that would have to be triangulated. Hopefully we'll never need it either way :)
