Holes in the baggage floor
I started off the day by mounting the transponder antennas. I decided that just aft of the bellcrank was a good spot. I could mount it right on the centerline and it would be out of the way of the push tubes. I printed out Trutrak’s diagram for mounting the pitch servo to make sure I was far enough aft of that. One other thing I did was trim off the edges of the doubler where I drilled all of the holes. Noone else seems to attach the doubler to the skin with rivets and it seemed like overkill to me as well. I cleaned off the little bit of primer on the skin to make sure the antenna had a good connection with ground. I ran some coax back there and was about to install the terminal on it, when I realized I needed a 3-blade coax stripper instead of the 2-blade that I have. I ordered one on Ebay for $11. I could probably cut it with a utility knife, but the coax strippers are much easier to use.
The other thing I worked on was cutting access holes in the baggage floor for the ELT and strobe power supply. I drilled holes in the corners, cut between them with a jigsaw using a fine-toothed blade (which worked really well), and filed up to the line. After doing all of that on one of them, I did a trial fit. I wasn’t happy with the shape of the hole. I was planning on leaving some extra material on the inboard side for attaching the hinge, but forgot about that. I might end up ordering new panels.