I noticed today that the edge of one of the support steps in the lid had some small voids.

I masked off the lid, mixed up a couple grams of epoxy and filled them up.

After finishing the hinge pin retention yesterday, I decided I wanted to do something slightly different. I think I want to avoid putting any large-ish holes through the sides of the lid. Since that hinge pin retainer would have required a flat head screw, it would end up cutting away a lot of material. Instead of that, I just made up a new retainer. This one will screw through the top of the lid which is much more stout.

In order to avoid putting a large hole through the other side of the lid, I decided to work on coming up with an alternate approach to the button I had machined earlier. This took quite a bit of time...I probably mentally designed 50 different latching approaches... none of which seemed ideal. Finally, I hit on an approach I liked. I'll show the result in a day or two.

By this time, the mail had arrived, and my (soft) rivets along with it.

Hrm...I used the shortest rivet length, AN426A3-3, and installed a test rivet. The aluminum still puckered quite a bit. I'm going to have to do something different.