Wow, I sure wish I had remembered to do this before installing the nutplates. Here's the issue...with the limited space available, installing screws in these locations will be very difficult, so I wanted to tap the nutplates to ease the screw installation. Tapping them would have been a one minute job if I had done it before riveting them in...just chuck the tap in the cordless drill, run it in and out and you're done. With the nutplates installed, it became a tedious process of one half turn at a time.

The forward most two nutplates actually had to be done with a crescent wrench since there wasn't enough room for the tap handle. This made a half turn at a time seem lightning fast. :-/

I managed to get all the bolts out of the left hand gear weldment in preparation for drilling the left side. The weldment still won't come out until I drill out the outboard nutplate in the center section top, forward flange. Maybe tomorrow...should only take a minute or two.