I have had the bag of parts emptied out on top of the OP46 Drawings on the workbench for a few days now. Tonight I made some progress. I drilled, countersunk, deburred, and edge finished the various parts. I also installed the two nut plates with some modification. My OP46 drawing does not match the backing plate part supplied in the kit. The drawing shows a standard hole for the upper mounting screw whereas the part comes with a slot – this is no big deal but was a little confusing. Thinking that maybe my drawing was a little out of date I consulted the plans CD I just bought. OP46 isn’t in the released package for some reason and I couldn’t find anything on Vans site either. The modification I had to make was for the lower mounting hole. The K1008 nutplate was too big to be mounted here. The nutplate hangs over the sides of the backing plate such that you can’t get holes for the rivets without violating edge margin. It wasn’t even close. I stole a “corner” nutplate from my Gretz Pitot mount kit and made it work for the most part. The remaining issue is that once assembled the stall warning can get hung up on these rivets. I think I can squash them a bit more and maybe file them down some if necessary to get the clearance.
