[malconium]

This weekend I re-installed a panel that I had taken off. It is one of the curved panels that can not be replaced with flat stock. Since I am planning eventually to paint my unit what I did was to remove the panel and pound out the dented and torn area enough that I can use a relatively small amount of bondo to fill the area prior to painting. At any rate I was able to re-install the panel just fine with a hand operated pop-rivit tool. Actually I found it useful to be able to partially set some of the rivits while I fine tuned the position of the panel. I also used a few pan head screws like Andy suggested to help align the panel. In this case I did not have to drill all new holes since the panel already had holes in the correct locations. I think I must have installed around 100 rivits alltogether. Probably the most anoying aspect of the install was that some of the olympic rivits popped their shafts off down inside of the rivit body rather than with the shaft sticking out some. I just drilled them out and reset them with a new rivit.

I nipped off most of the rivit shafts with a bolt cutter and now just have to shave them down flush. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to do that cleanly enough without hving to buy an expensive rivit shaver just for this job? Or does anyone know of a source of a relatively cheap rivit shaver? I tried grinding a couple down with my Dremel tool which worked but the results are not quite as even as I would like.

By the way since I have the inner skins off I patched the back side of the tear in the panel with Elasto Seal and seam tape. I could have done it while the panel was off too of course but it was easier to hold on to once it was back in place. The tear was basically closed up once I had pounded the panel back into reasonable shape. I just wanted to have a water proof seal until I am ready to bondo the area from the outside. It seems to have worked. If there had been a larger gap left I probably would have used a fiberglass patch kit instead.

Malcolm