Panel Planning

[BGordon]

Good morning everyone,
I am starting to lay out my panel to see where I want stuff and how much room will be available. I always see others with nifty scale cut outs of things such as steam gauges, radio stacks, etc... Does anyone know where I can find these so that I can do the same?
thanks in advance
Brandon

[cfiidon]

Many of the equipment manufacturers show cut outs on there web sites, typically in their "support" section.

Their installation manuals also provide dimensions, so that you can do it by hand.

I also recommend you buy a cheap copy of Turbocad for making switch drill templates and label panels... We'll worth the 15 bucks or so.

I also used a software panel planner that had all the equipment templates, can't remember the name right now... Senior moment!

Google to the rescue... Xpanelsoftware.com

Don

[Dbro172]

Draft sight has a good free cad download and in fact there is a link to it on Vans support section of their website. If you're not familiar with cad you may need someone to help jump start you on the basic commands. There is also panel drawings on vans site you can open in cad. With this you can scale and place any image from the web.

I would usually grab an image from google (say of a garmin 430 for example) then lookup the dimensions in the 430 manual and scale the image to that. This works OK for planning.

[SvingenB]

This one is very nice. Here you can play around as much as you want to see of different layouts work. You can also "import" your own pictures of gauges and instruments.

http://www.xpanelsoftware.com/