For an old school compass I’m going the vertical compass card route, and its lighted as well. This sort of compass reads like a DG and what I call the right way around. If you have a whiskey compass in your plane you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The compass needs to be installed with non metallic fittings and be well away from the panel and ferrous metal. It was always going to be a challenge on my build. While you get a mounting ring with the unit it was never going to work so I had to design my own.

This is one of the attempts to get the thing straight and the holes lined up. I had three tries.  Oh and I took quite a while sourcing that aluminium angle too.  The hole saw I had from the nineties when I put an instrument in my glider panel. That’s the last time it was used.

It took another go to realise that I needed such a long tail on the mount to make it work. I wanted it out of line of sight of the window and it had to be partly above the longeron but clear of the canopy rail when it closed..

My mounting idea used a bit of C channel. It wasn’t quite thick enough so I riveted on another piece. Knowing I had to glue one face to the longeron I also made multiple holes for the epoxy to have ‘fingers’ for better adhesion. The green fitting is a rivnut that I later squeezed in place. Yeah not a pretty fitting, sorry.

Is this making sense yet? The little extrusion gets glued below the longeron and its face is meeting at the same  width to give a base. I set this up and let it cure over night.

After the cure I drilled a hole in the longeron for the second rivnut. I later glued this in place which gives me the two mounting points. All thats left is a trim of the compass mount.

I’ll use different screws and some foam packing. Here I’m showing off the nice shape which overall took WAY too long to design and make.

Simple right?

Here’s how it looks with the compass mounted.

Just a simple little job that took more than 10 days. Yes I did other stuff too but this was a real time soak. I have a few tweaks to finish it off, however….this is enough for the log!