I have a feeling that I will eventually want to make changes to the instrument panel once the plane is "done," and thinking about trying to crawl into the footwell made me pretty unhappy. So I decided I'd spend a little time and a few grams of extra hardware to make it possible to remove the panel later.
The panel on the B-model is attached to a bracket at each of the lower corners, and a flange on the underside of the glare shield.
The brackets attach to the bottom of the panel with 8 rivets per side. It was a tight fit but I squeezed #8 nutplates in for each hole!
The other attachment point is the flange underneath the glare shield. It's mostly flat, except for the curved portions which are fluted. I installed more #8 nutplates along the flat part.
For the curved area, I'll just use #8 screws and nuts. I think reaching a socket around the back of the panel to remove those few nuts in the future will be annoying but still way easier than drilling out rivets or working on the panel with it installed!
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