Forward of the throttle I am putting six controls into the armrest. The two seat heaters, the pitot heat and oil heat and the two cooling fan switches. In other words this is my ‘heat’ area for the aircraft avionic controls.

First up I wanted the seat heater switches to be very close to the top of the armrest. This meant I needed to remove some foam and make a bed. Pretty easy.

I did a good job of making the switch mounts and epoxied them in place over night. That all worked out really well until I went to drill out for the switches. Too much force on the bracket and it failed at the wall. On to version 2.

Ignore the hot glue, this is a nice new bracket. A fraction wider so of course I had to cut into my simple layup, that should have been a few mm wider and deeper. Another over night cure.

Here’s my plan for this section. Pity that nice Ovation guitar knob didn’t work out . I’ll have to find something boring instead.

The bracket worked out except that it was a bit flimsy. I made the supporting piece you see above. It worked out about 1mm too high in the end but I have decided to leave it and round off a few corners. It is unnoticeable except that I just told you. I do want to finish and fly next year!

Oh and now you can see the interface box that I installed earlier.

On to the next bracket for the 4 remaining controls. This will sit just under the armrest and poke through. Its a weird shape as I’m going to rivet it to the existing armrest right angle piece as it just happens to be there. I could have ripped that out and made a single piece. Of course that would have needed other bits riveted too it so not much weight difference and probably another days work.

After quite some hours fiddling, especially the oil heater pot as it is so big under the plate and of course hard against the fuselage wall which needed a tweak.

Here we are done, except for a knob change. The switches are accessible but hardly protrude above the armrest as planned.

While not yet done you can see that armrest is busy!

Yes, I can put my arm down there and not notice all that stuff.