I took some time to get the front top skin down from storage and dust it off. I felt it better to cleco it in place so that I could get a good idea of what the panel orientation would look like. I went ahead and grabbed some cushions and climbed aboard and sat in the cockpit for another official ergonomics review. I found a few things that need to be adjusted…like the right mag switch is a little more difficult to get to with the windscreen bow support where it is. I like the vertical placement, but would like to move it over to the left some more – I will have to do the full size mockup of the switches and the switch guards and see how much room I have on the right side panel. I could go lower on the side panel too, if needed.
I might also be too close to the left side of the “no zone” when I factor in the need for an angle support to mount the radio stack to…but I did learn of a tip off of my buddy Steve’s log and I might look into incorporating that “fix” – more about that later. The other option is just to move the main screen more to the right along with the radio stack…which isn’t a terrible idea as the screen is normally split anyway, so it makes it a little more like a center screen and a right screen instead of one big screen.
I also started the process of drawing the panel dimensions...
