Quite a few evenings were spent on fitting, prepping, and finishing interior panels.  The rear seat bottoms were riveted on after mulling over anything that might need to be accessed under them.  Since I don’t have conduit running along the floor and already have the antenna doublers installed, I went ahead and secured the panels for good.  I’m starting to wish I had splurged or asked a friend for a pneumatic pop rivet gun.

There are quite a few panels on the interior to work through.  The tunnel covers, front seat pans, side panels, and cross bar panel were all fairly simple to prep and prime after drilling.  They required a lot of nutplates to be installed on the fuselage, a few of which are in really tight spots.  I ended up using a few blind rivets on the nutplates just because I couldn’t get a rivet gun / bucking bar or squeezer in the space.  I was fortunate enough to have a few guys at work make a custom bucking bar for one rivet near the baggage door frame which worked like a champ.  This whole section is somewhat of a tease, as you get all these panels finished and the cabin looks really nice until you read the plans and it tells you to set them all aside until the project is finished.

I’m also planning more detailed runs for wires and hoses since the time is right working with the panels.  I used a flexible edge grommet material to prepare for wires passing through lightening holes that are too large for snap bushings.  These will be for wires, pitot tubing, coax, and anything else that needs to run fore/aft.