As I had said previously, the panel ribs need to be modified in most cases in order to accept several modern EFIS's. For me I will probably only need the left side but I modified the right also just in case. To do this I used some 1x1 aluminum angle that I got from Home Depot. This stuff is most certainly not 6061 but it will work for what I'm doing. I looked at many different examples of this modification from hatchet jobs to bridge construction and came up with what I did below. Basically I came straight back about 5 inches from the bottom of the panel attach point. From there I angled down to a point about an inch from where the rib passes through the sub panel. I then made two cuts in the angle to allow for these two bends and bent it up to where it looked about right. I then traced this onto the rib and cut it out on the bandsaw. Once cut and cleaned up I layed out the rivets on the angle and drilled them. I then placed the angle on the rib and match drilled it. I also carried the new angle through the subpanel and riveted it to the existing ribs flange to tie the whole thing together nicely. One note is that I essentially set the rib inside the angle. This causes a problem where the subpanels tie together because of the added thicknes of the angle. I felt the angle was more important than one rivet on the subpanel so I nothched the subpanel flange and rebent it to make up for the thickness difference. This also offset the rivet hole so that there is about 1/16th of material between the old and new holes. No big deal.
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