Panel Designs HOBBS 221.5 hrs

The other night I was playing around with some panel concepts. I plan to do a custom panel for my plane. The flat panels found in most aircraft built before 2000 (including the RV series) are very tired and boring to me. There is no sexiness to them. I want to crawl into my cockpit and immediately smile at how everything is laid out. Everything in its well thought out place, all viewing angles of the LCD's oriented toward the pilot. Switches, levers, guages at comfortable distance from my hands. In my opinion, aircraft cockpits should have more of a wraparound feel like new sports cars and a lot of the newer aircraft, Cirrus for example has a nice layout. This will be an ongoing design process. I plan to do most of the work on SolidWorks and then do some full scale mockups before finalizing the design. Here is a view of a rough start, to give you an idea what I am talking about.