Brief Description: Farbricating nutplates for tie-down rings - Page 1
The shop instructions suggest fabricating large nutplates for the upper longeron gussets that attach to the fuselage bulkhead just behind the rear seat cockpit. Since I don't weld I opted for making the plates from some 3/8" think soft aluminum plate. Unfortunately, I didn't have any scrap laying around the shop and I didn't want to wait on another on-line order. So, I made a visit to a local industrial scrap/surplus outlet and got lucky.
I found a scrapped fixture that was made form 3/8" thick aluminum. I was able to purchase it for $5. Once disassembled, there was plenty of material for the two small nutplates. You can see in the third image below the two plates required marked in Sharpie and already drilled and tapped for the tie-down rings. A 5/16" drill and a 3/8-16 tap is required to match the rings.
