I had been looking for a place to mount the isolation diodes for those items on the essential bus, but hadn’t found a place I liked. I wanted to mount them to the subpanel or one of the subpanel ribs for heat dissipation reasons, but there’s not a lot of free space left. They need to be mounted with screws that penetrate the mounting surface, so the other side of where they mount has to be free. There was plenty of room on the back side of the right subpanel (behind the right SkyView backup battery, but only if I spaced them away from the subpanel a bit. I fabricated this little mounting block out of some 0.063″ sheet and some z-channel. This has a lot more thermal mass than the subpanel anyway, so it will help keep the diodes cool. I mounted them all with some thermal paste to help heat transfer into the aluminum.
I installed nutplates on the back side in case I ever need to remove one of the diodes.
Nutplates are also installed in the z-channels so that this can be screwed in from the front. Everything that installs onto the subpanel needs to be removable so that I can pull it out when I paint the interior.
I installed the essential bus fuse box just above the battery bus fuse box. Each of the wires from the essential bus will run over to the isolation diode bank, so this is a pretty good location since it keeps the wiring runs short.
I also fabricated this little ground block that is installed under the avionics interconnect bus on the left side of the subpanel. I soldered two 22AWG wires to all of the pins on the back side of this connector and then grounded it using one of the mounting screws. All of the VP-X switches just sense ground (there is effectively no current), so there is no point in running individual ground wires all the way back to the firewall grounding block.
I ran ground wires to all of the switches that will be connected to the VP-X. Now all I need to do is run wires from the other connectors on the switches directly to the VP-X and all of the switches should work.
