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Flushing in the cockpit

By Amit Dagan

No, I don’t mean making blue ice that falls from the sky; I am talking about the other type of flush, as in flush rivets.

I wanted the map box in my panel to have a flush door, so that it will not protrude from the instrument panel itself. The following implements this idea in a way which is simple, requires no extra support for the door in the open position, and looks nice. The latch I used is also quite nifty and pretty cheap (did I say nothing protrudes?). Read the entire directions carefully before cutting any metal!

Ten steps to a flush door for the Van’s standard map box:

  1. Order Van’s very useful map box kit, part# MAP BOX KIT.
  1. Mark the compartment’s opening on the instrument panel according to the directions. You will cut the opening to slightly larger dimensions in step #4 below, but you still want to mark the opening according to directions to start with.  Note that some modification to the deck structure behind the panel may be required, depending on the RV model and canopy style.
  1. Cut the material for the door to different dimensions than the plans: You want the width of the door to be slightly smaller than the size of the opening you marked on the instrument panel, about 1/16” narrower to allow for paint, and the height should be a little larger. For a sanity check, you’ll be making the door approximately 6.25 inches wide by 4 inches high. Don’t cut anything before you complete reading these instructions and understand what’s going to happen next.
  1. Make the hole in the instrument panel larger than in the plans, in the downwards direction, paralleling the original mark of the bottom of the hole. At this point the door material should just fit inside the opening, so it is a good idea to use the door material as a template to trace the hole you are cutting in the panel. Measure twice – cut once.

  1. Cut off the bottom flange of the bottom half of the box. It will not be used in this installation. Just trim it so that the bottom of the box is flat with no sign of the flange that you just cut off.

  1. Prepare the door hinge. The length of the hinge is not critical but I suggest leaving it longer than the width of the door. This will help in achieving a nice flush fit of the door in the closed position.
  1. Drill and dimple for riveting one half of the hinge to the map box bottom: The hinge goes ON THE OUTSIDE of the box (outside surface of the box’s floor), with flush rivets (flush factory head goes INSIDE the box), so that the floor of the box is smooth. Make sure you are riveting this half of the hinge close to where you removed the flange in step 5 above, so that when the door is closed it is flush with the instrument panel.

  1. The other half of the hinge is riveted to the door, on the bottom of the “IN” side, but the hinge itself will actually not be inside the box, but rather just below the bottom side.

Make sure you orient the hinge so that the flange of the hinge is towards the bottom of the door (when the door is closed), and the hinge pin is towards the upper end of the door (see diagram below).

Alternate the rivets along the length of the hinge between the two halves of the hinge, so that when the door is in the open position (and the two halves are the closest to each other), the shop heads do not interfere with each other. In the open position, the door stays perpendicular to the plane of the instrument panel because it is stopped by the two hinge halves.

You will machine countersink the hinge half which attaches to the box bottom (which gets dimpled), and leave the other half drilled (the door gets machine countersunk).

  1. Proceed with the rest of the installation per plans: rivet the two halves of the box together (good luck setting the flush rivets way in there on the inside of the box… no shame using pop-rivets here ;) and the box to the panel. The hinge pin can be inserted from the side after the box is riveted to the panel, or may be divided into two halves and inserted from the center, similar to the manner in which the flap hinge pin is inserted. I see no reason to ever having to remove the door, but that is up to the individual builder.
     
  1. Use any kind of latch you like for the door (I used McMaster p/n 10825A28, a push-push trick). A magnetic latch would work also, but you might want to consider carefully before placing any magnetic material in the vicinity of the compass.

There you have it.  The nifty part about this installation is that the door supports itself in the open position – no further support or stop is needed.

The final result after paint, rivet heads showing through the thin layer of paint in the picture: