Tanya & Bryan Duke's RV-6 Panel Rebuild
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06 Aug 05: Today we had a lazy morning then headed out to the airport to get some work done on the plane. Tanya started by getting all the screws ready to paint. Sticking them into a piece of styrofoam was the perfect way to hold them all in place for the paint.



She primed then painted all the screw heads & a couple other little things. They will look really nice once installed.



I installed the VA-168 manifold from Vans. It has spaces for 3 sensors, but we're just using it for fuel & oil pressure for the AF2500 engine monitor. It took us both to bolt the thing in place through the firewall. Tanya secured all the wiring to the sensors.



Tanya then replaced some aging cooling vent lines. The starter & alternator both have new cool air vents now to keep them happy. Tanya secured the SCAT tubing the same way the old vent lines were held in place. The old ones were plastic & worked for a while, but the heat got to them & they became very brittle. SCAT tubing should last forever.



After much debate and brainstorming from John Bacon & Dan Checkoway, we decided to put our fuel flow sensor between the engine driven fuel pump and the carb. This way fuel is getting pushed through the sensor instead of getting sucked through it. This should lead to a more reliable setup. Tanya re-routed the fuel flow sensor wire through the firewall & secured it with the sensor wiring bundle for the left side of the engine. We'll build the bracket & install the fuel flow sensor once I get fuel lines to make it happen.



This is just a "little" project, but it's a huge deal when you've finished an area and can seal it off for good. Tanya cleaned up the tail area & put the fairing back in place. We'll bolt everything down in the next couple trips to the airport. The back half of the plane now looks like an airplane again!



The last thing I had to install under the dash was the cooling fan for the radio stack. Since the radio stack moved, the old fan installation won't work. We re-bent the existing fan mount to point at the radio stack and mounted it in a different place. We'll test run it before we put the panel on for good.



One more thing we had to do was adjust the height of the center stack. The old panel and the new panel are about a 1/16" different in the height of the mounting holes. That's just enough that the center stack doesn't quite fit without putting some load on the parts. I enlarged the bottom mounting holes slightly of the main center sub-panel & trimmed off about 1/8" of the bottom. I masked off the rest of it and Tanya repainted it. We didn't test fit it with the size, but it should fit fine.



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