Getting it together -- ever so slowly

I am loathe to bore any more holes than necessary in Ms. Bettencourt's now pristine refinished dashboard, but the time has come to re-install the piloting instruments. After a lot of thought, I decided to mount most of the instruments on a leftover mahogany scrap, then screw the wooden mounting board to the dash.

The brackets for the VHF radio, the depth sounder and the Chartplotter have a total of eleven mounting holes. These were drilled in the mahogany billet, then the wood, which is about a half-inch thick, was affixed to the fiberglass dashboard with only three screws through trim washers.

The mahogany used for the base, left over from making a new mast last winter, turned out to have about the right shape to fit the curvature of the flat space under the windshield.

While it's beautiful wood, my wife the design consultant convinced me the plaque would look better painted.

She was right. Here's a photo shot from the inboard end of the now-painted mounting showing the VHF radio in the foreground.












The photo below shows the whole mounted array, shot from the steering position. Everything is visible and reachable.

All the power wires and data cables will feed down to the electrical panel below through a single, neatly grommeted, one inch hole a little forward of the instrument panel.

Notice the compass on the far left. I plan to raise it about an inch on a separate painted mounting block.


A decision remains to be made on where to place the microphone hanger for the VHF radio. I'm wary of the microphone's magnetic properties effecting the accuracy of the compass.

Perhaps I'll just leave it adrift until a better idea surfaces.