J

JDBoston

Well Known Member
I have been working on my panel design in Fusion360 and one thing I don't see a lot is anyone leaving a gap between units in the radio stack. Is there a reason other than the preference for just one large hole for a true "stack"? Hopefully this isn't a silly question. I was thinking that would also allow for some heat dissipation.

Each unit of course has a different size for the recommended cutout, so my thought was to just leave perhaps 1/4" between each unit. It is all Garmin G3X, Autopilot controller, GTR200, GNX375, and a GMA345 audio panel. I have attached a rough idea of what I am thinking... Still working on it.

One thing that I noticed is that I did not really size this including the bezel so I will have to increase some of the dimensions for planning purposes, but the question is still the same.


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JDBoston said:
I have been working on my panel design in Fusion360 and one thing I don't see a lot is anyone leaving a gap between units in the radio stack. Is there a reason other than the preference for just one large hole for a true "stack"? Hopefully this isn't a silly question. I was thinking that would also allow for some heat dissipation.

Each unit of course has a different size for the recommended cutout, so my thought was to just leave perhaps 1/4" between each unit. It is all Garmin G3X, Autopilot controller, GTR200, GNX375, and a GMA345 audio panel. I have attached a rough idea of what I am thinking... Still working on it.


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In my stack I needed every inch I could get plus the Garmin trays all mated together to form a more rigid structure. On the 10 I also had to contend with the center rib.
 

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It might be different if you're going to pay somebody to water jet or CNC your panel cutouts, but since the panel is too thick for an air nibbler, I did mine by drilling a bunch of holes and connecting the dots with a cutting disc in a Dremel. If you're going old school like that It's a lot easier to just cut one big hole and fill it up with a stack where all the racks are tied together. It also minimizes wasted space. That's a significant consideration on a small panel.

As far as heat dissipation, the racks and radios are designed to be somewhat stacked and Garmin installs cooling fans in boxes that need them. I killed two birds with one stone there and also installed computer fans in the glare shield so I can suck that hot air out from behind the panel and use it to defrost the windscreen.

When I built my center stack, I spaced the racks out by the thickness of a couple of popsicle sticks both to let some more air through there and to make it easier to pull individual boxes out without the bezels rubbing. It's all one big hole, but you can't really tell unless you look close.
 

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It's not a terrible idea to separate components in the radio stack vertically by 1/16" or so, but instead of cutting individual square holes it's much less work to just have one big cutout for the whole radio stack. Any tiny gap between adjacent radios will never be noticed, and you'll have less work to do in the future if you decide to change things around.
 
Panel real estate is hard to come by so I have always tried to not waste any of it. If something does not have to be on the panel and could be located else where such as USB charger, heated seats switches, etc just to save space for feature use, I have done that. You will never know what other goodies become available in the feature that we would love to install if we could fit it on the panel.
That 1/4" of space between equipment will make the installation of the trays harder and will waste some space that could potentially be used for other things.
 
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