Well I bit the bullet and decided to drill out all of the 4-7 rivets at the forward left edge of the top skin. The skin just does not want to lay down tight. I ordered the Cherry Max rivets today and they should arrive by Friday. After drilling the rivets out, I may need to order one oversize. I will have to check the tolerances in the Cherry Max Guide. This took a while because I took my time as I did not want to hose this up, thankfully it is all good. I can use draw clecoes and get the skin nice and tight, so I will use those as I set the Cherry rivets.
The last thing I did in the evening after warming up the garage was to paint the dash flat black. This is mostly for corrosion protection, since I intend to put a piece of black Velcro down (the soft rug side). This will allow me to Velcro down the GPS/WX antenna to the dash. I don’t want to permanently mount these antennas since I plan to upgrade to the Garmin 696 at some point in the future. I will have to make a template out of pasteboard because I can’t have the Velcro installed when I glue the windscreen.
While painting I taped up my Alt Static Handle and painted on the black stripe.
