Riveting interior to the skin a standard installation practice?

[Oldguy]

After I came back from the Mooney Summit (thanks again, Mike, Abe, Ron and everyone) I decided to take my broken baggage door support arm off and have it repaired. To do so required taking a bit of the interior loose to get to everything. And thinking about Bruce Jaeger's Spatial Interior, I wanted to see how hard it was to take off what I had loose and - maybe - go ahead with the new interior.

Take out a screw, bag it and tag it, remove the piece of plastic and repeat. Until I came to the pilot's side of the rear headliner covering the vent hoses. I couldn't get the screwdriver to get a bite on any of the screws. Upon further inspection, I figured out why. The plastic headliner is riveted to the skin! Is this a standard installation practice? So if I am thinking correctly, to replace the rear headliner, I have to drill out the rivets and rivet the new piece back in and paint the outside skin where I put the new rivets.

I have never heard this mentioned in any of the threads, so I had to throw it out there. If it is SOP, I'll just adjust plans and timing on painting and interior replacement.

John

[jclemens]

That's how it came from the factory.

[kortopates]

Luckily they abandoned that practice at some point. There are no pop rivets into the skin of my '86 K. The front pilot seat headliner is screwed into the rear seat headliner with 4 screws and nutplates/tinnermans that are screwed in from the top of the headliner which is real hard to re-install them if you are not removing the entire ceiling - such as doing a vent repair as I did.

[Randy_B]

My 84' M20J had 4 machine screws with nuts and washers holding the pilot side of that panel in place.  There were also multiple #6 sheet metal screws attached thru the passenger side of the panel at the luggage door opening.  My interior had been refinished and the exterior painted prior to me buying it.  So, I can't say whether the  machine screws were original for 1984. 

 

 

Mooney (2).pdf

[Oldguy]

Thanks for the info, all. I would think on an interior replacement you could go back with the screws and nuts like Randy has, but I think I will make that call when I end up replacing the plastic in the interior.

Thanks again.