The International Cessna 170 Association

I'm going down the same path!

If you're making 1 or 2 panels, you can make the form out of hardwood (Home Depot Oak) and it will be fine. Cutting the form out of Oak is basic wood working skills. The trick will be making a steel box big enough and a press strong enough to form it at once while applying even pressure over something that long. Else you're doing it in stages and the risk of messing it up increases.

The other idea that I am playing with is to vacuum bag it out of either glass or carbon fiber. You'd NEVER know the difference unless you were the one that installed it. In fact, you could even mould in the super expensive bezel shapes and no one would know.

Before you guys go crazy fabricating homemade panels, I would see what the cost would be to get a die made for a real hydroform press would cost. If one could be made relatively inexpensively (ie for material cost and a favor for a machine shop owner), then the actual panels themselves wouldn't be too expensive. I know two guys that fly/used to fly model airplanes, Geoff Combs in Ohio and Mike Gaishin in Michigan that own machine shops and if there is enough interest to get parts made, I could investigate. The more guys that commit to getting parts made, the less expensive it would be to amortize the cost of the tooling. At that point glove box doors, and lower panels could be made as well. All of the panels could be blank with templates provided for making cutouts for instruments/radios/govebox, etc.

Perhaps this would be a good time to reach out to the C120/140 Association and see if there would be interest in it. If we could get 10-20 guys to do an order, it may not be too bad. That said, I don't know what the cost is going to be, but I think you guys would spend about the same to get tooled up to try to make these parts as you would to buy one outright from a machine shop. Furthermore, you'd need a pretty large press to be able to form the main shock panel, I believe that rib nose that was made on the video was a 10 ton press...I'd imagine that a 20 ton press or larger would be required to make parts as large as we're talking.

Alternatively, I have some really good connections with guys that do composites, and I had seriously thought of doing a nice mold for carbon fiber cover panels and glove box door. The bezels could be easily made out of carbon or glass and painted, or a special mold could be made for doing radiused edges on the instruments as this panel has. If we have enough interest to warrant investigation, the next step would be to do a cost buildup for both scenarios to see if there is much difference from one to the other. I would guess that most guys would be inclined towards original materials versus those (like myself) that wouldn't really care either way or would be more interested in a composite replica.

Just thinking out loud.

Count me in for one of each