Lots of little tasks to get done over the Martin Luther King Day weekend. I took an extra day off to have a four-day weekend with nothing to do but airplane stuff…woohoo!

One of the more common mods to the cockpit area is installing a cover on the rollbar channel bottom. Not only does it look better, but it also provides a nice surface to mount things like lights, coat hooks, fuzzy dice, or other cool stuff.

The flanges are somewhat narrow, so I had previously ordered some K1000-06 platenuts and #6 pan-head screws from Vans. This was pretty much a seat-of-the-pants project…I just laid out some appropriately-spaced holes on the cover plate and match-drilled it to the channel.

Sorry for the fuzzy pic, but you get the general idea.

After some drilling, deburring, dimpling and squeezing, the end product looks nice.

I also broke open the Bondo and filled two tooling holes on the rollbar…messy work, but it’ll be nice to have no holes there when I paint the interior.

I also took some time to fit the side channel covers. Nothing difficult here, except getting an angle drill in the right place to match-drill some of these holes.

I also decided to add some platenuts to the channel covers, just in case I want to attach something like an iPad mount or a pivoting all-attitude beer holder. They’re small in this picture, but if you look at the top of the channel you’ll see them.