The instrument panel is made of 1/8" aluminum and shock mounted to the frame. I had the remains of 2 original panes, neither of which was worth using or repairing. The easy solution was to just make a new one. I have no interest in instrument flying so I chose to go back to just basic instruments in the original arrangement. With the parts manual and the owners manual it was easy to figure out which holes in these parts were original and what had been added or modified.
Before I drew the new panel on the aluminum I made a CAD drawing to work out the dimensions without wasting expensive aluminum.
This is the original arrangement of the instruments.
Some measurements were needed to create this drawing. Small hole sizes are easy to measure with a set of drills to use The larger holes are measured and located by scanning the parts and bringing the scan into the CAD file. Scale the image based on the length and width which are easy to measure and just draw over the image. Knowing things were done to fractions of an inch makes resolving exact measurements easy.
The outline is cut and the small holes punched or drilled. The biggest holes I could punch in .125" 2024-T3 were 5/32" diameter. Even those were hard. The holes for the lights were punched 1/8" and drilled to 7/16" with a #5 center drill. There are some 9/64" and 11/64" holes. I just punched them one size smaller and used the drill press to finish drill them to size.
Now I just need to cut the instrument holes. I don't have a cutter for this so I'll just have to use the jig saw on the Shopsmith
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