As I mentioned, when I decided to take out the hard-wired video recorder system from the aft baggage area, this left the hat shelf and right sidewall with ugly notches where the wiring harness passed through. I initially built a cover plate to hide the notch in the hat shelf. The sidewall was easy -- I just bought another peice of sheet metal and started over. But the hat shelf began to bug me. I had already spent many painstaking hours building a cool access hatch for the autopilot servo and elevator bellcrank, and I just didn't want to ditch all that work and start over with a new hat shelf, but that lone cover plate looked like it was covering up a major error of some kind. I could already hear a future question from another builder at Oshkosh, or perhaps a judge -- "What's that little access port on the right side of the baggage compartment?" Ugh.
My solution? Add a second "cover plate" on the opposite side. In my opinion, this greatly eases the esthetic look of the whole thing -- it makes it look like those plates are supposed to be there. Once everything is painted, people should hardly notice.
The newly un-needed cutout.
A cover plate only made it look lopsided and weird.
