No building today, we instead opted to hop on the bandwagon and go watch the movie Jurassic World with some friends and family. First time at the movie theater in a while... I think I prefer the comfort of our couches and the lack of screaming children in the theater. Seriously, who brings an infant to a thriller film about dinosaurs? </rant>
Anyway.... found out today that the ebay sellers accepted my $200 offer on the breaker panel! Exciting. Hopefully this will work as planned. If not, like I said earlier at least we'll have a stack of parts we can still use.
A question popped into my mind though that I should have thought about earlier: What happened to the Cirrus this panel came out of? I'm not a very superstitious person at all, and I guess whatever happened to this panel in a former life wouldn't really bother me too much, but it would be nice to know anyway. So I googled the tail number, N407ND, which lead me to discovering an interesting "small-world" type coincidence. Back in December ('14) a Cirrus had crashed on a go-around in Colorado, after a student pilot encountered rotor downwash from a Blackhawk helicopter that had departed just moments before. A high-definition surveillance tape caught the entire incident and made its rounds through our circle of pilot friends shortly after the occurrence (link to the video here). Lots of speculation as to how much the downwash actually played into the accident, but I'll save that discussion for another time and place. Point is, the panel I bought is out of that plane... and, the accident had no serious injuries or fatalities... cool! No bad juju. My friend Mark suggested that I should still offer rum and cigars to Jobu, just in case. Might not be a bad idea.
