Today was all about getting the front left pilot’s armrest hinged storage bin cover installed.

I started off by assessing the gap between the inboard edge of the storage bin and the edge of the long opening in the armrest.  With the curve of the sidewall, the gap was much more pronounced towards the front of the opening than the aft side… just under 1/8″ at the widest gap point.

I decided that instead of just filling this gap with micro, with the potential in my mind for it to very likely eventually chip off, that I would glass the armrest long edge storage compartment opening.  This involved 4 plies of glass: 1x full length, 1x 3/4 length starting from front corner aft, then 2.3″ and 1.5″ lengths to fill in the widest gap point.  I used flox corners in the foam and peel plied the layup.

As the armrest storage bin opening edge layup cured, I got to work finalizing my circuits for the oil heat sub-panel.  I also ran out to grab lunch and run some errands with Jess.

A few hours later I pulled the peel ply, razor trimmed and cleaned up the layup.

I then spent a little bit finalizing the no-kidding install configuration on the left armrest storage compartment hinged cover.  I marked and cut the front and aft edges of the armrest just a hair (~0.1″) to allow the storage compartment cover to sit even with the top of the armrest.  After confirming it was all level with the armrest (with a few strategically placed razor blades) I then floxed it into place.  I actually had some stir sticks and toothpicks wedging the long inboard edge in place, but this pic is just following when I removed those about 2.5 hours later.

I then worked the hinge back and forth (I applied a layer of wheel bearing grease to the hinge pin before floxing the cover into place to avoid any flox gumming up and/or locking up the hinge movement) and removed some excess flox that had squeezed out in different directions… which I’d say was about 80% cured and still just a very bit gummy.

After another couple hours of cure (during which I was soldering wires on the oil heat sub-panel switches… I’ll show the finished product in tomorrow’s post) and ensuring the hinge rotated freely, which it does. I then taped up the cover around the edges, added micro to the edge/lip of the armrest around the storage compartment and then set the cover back down into place to allow for a nice narrow seam between cover and armrest storage opening edges.

I then left the micro to cure overnight, and did just a bit more wire-soldering before calling it a night.