Up North Aviation Pirep

I just wanted to post a quick note to anyone thinking about getting their panel CNC cut. I just had my panel done by Up North Aviation. Bill did a great job at converting my DXF file into the real thing. He also knew the Van's part number for the "oversized" panel I needed. Below is a pic of the panel he sent me. The panel was cut and shipped the day after I sent him the file. I wish I could work that fast on the rest of the plane!! I also included a pic of the CAD model of what the final product should look like. I'll post a pic of the panel when it's finally installed in the plane.

I Concur

Bill does great work and provides outstanding customer service.

Excellent service

Bill was great to work with and spent a long time working with me to refine my panel layout. The final product (sorry - no photos yet) is well finished. It was a lot less fuss than the performance I went through with my RV-8 panel. Well worth the $$ or in my case ??.

Highly recommended - Ill add some photos soon.

JRichichi said:

I also included a pic of the CAD model of what the final product should look like. I'll post a pic of the panel when it's finally installed in the plane.

Click to expand...

Where did you get the model files for the avionics? Dis you just create them from whatever dimensions you could get from the manuals and guess the missing ones? It would be a great pubic service if we could develop a library of solid model files for popular avionics devices (still wishing one would show up for a Lycoming but that seems a pipe dream).

CAD Files

I think that would be a great idea to have an area where we could store/retrieve CAD models. Maybe keeping the models on one of the CAD sharing websites (www.grabcad.com??) would be good and then just linking to the websites. A "CAD Model" thread would have all of the links to various sources in it.

As far as where I got my CAD files, AFS sent me the model of their AF-5600 (thanks again!!) and many of the switches (NKK & IDEC) I was able to get from their companies websites. Small things like screws and nuts I got from the McMaster website (I think the McMaster website is a CAD junkies wet dream!). Just about everything else I modeled up myself (with varying levels of fidelity).

For the Garmin radios, I made them from a combination of what I could find in their manuals and the actual radios themselves. They are not that high of fidelity. I mainly was worried about getting them dimensionally correct so I could get the cutout in the panel correct and the subpanel brackets/cutouts correct. As far as getting the screens to "display", I just added a picture (properly cropped) taken from the users manuals to the CAD model to make it look like the display was on. I really wish Garmin would have "dumb" models of their hardware for folks like us to use. It's not like I plan to get into the avionics business or anything. It just would be nice to have had the actual CAD files of the various radio racks. It would have made life much easier on that front.