Since we’re going to completely disassemble the car before final assembly so that we can finish the chassis, we’ve been temporarily attaching all of the aluminum panels with sheet metal screws. We had been planning on riveting the panels on during final assembly, but if we ever need to remove the panels, we’d have to drill out the rivets. I don’t know how likely that is, but I’m really trying to plan for any possible future maintenance. To that end, we decided to attach all panels with screws.
I started drilling out the attachment holes and installing rivnuts. I haven’t counted how many of these I’ll need, but I’ve used up the first 100 I ordered and I’m a long way from being done. I’m guessing there are close to 500 over the whole car.