Today I decided to use my Friday off work to tackle the firewall. Having already primed the firewall I needed to drill a bunch of holes, debur and rivet. In the following post I discuss my choice of rivets. You may notice in the first picture that I actually have 44 flush rivets installed holding the framework together. This was a decisioin that made sense to me. So, I ended up with 161 (not 163) blind rivets attaching the firewall to the frame. I am very pleased with the results, even if it took me the whole day. One of these hours accounts for searching after missing parts. Another one of the hours was spent remaking the upper corner gusset plates. The reason for remaking was due to holes not lining up well after setting the top rivets on the frame. Rather than put a whole bunch of stress I decided to remove some 20 rivets and make new ones. Fortunately I have a metal brake and plenty of stock metal in the shop. I ended up placing an order with Bushcaddy for a few small parts that will arrive next week. I am now in the process of determining how I will mount the panel (PF-163) and turtle deck (PF-160). I also have to figure out what PF-155 (2 of the parts I ordered that were missing) are doing on the control panel.
