Upside Down T-Nuts

My insistence on using t-nuts is really making my life difficult. I think they are the right piece of hardware for the job (due to large surface area for bonding and load distribution), but they are a pain. For instance, I planned to install the t-nuts for the bow cleat and anchor chock from underneath the buttstrap. But I could not hammer them in from that angle and I didn't want to rely on tape to hold them up (if I used the non-hammer using variety). So I installed them upside down and put shallow counterbores on the bottom of the deck to allow for a flush fit. Here is a pic of the counterbores.

And then a picture of the t-nut "tops" that will fit in the counterbores.

This is only one of the little annoyances. For the 1/2" bolts that hold the beam, I originally drilled out 5/8" holes. The bummer is that I need the hole that big just to accommodate the t-nut (if left like that I would not have an epoxy barrier inside the hole). So I redrilled those to 3/4" and re-filled with filled epoxy. This way I can re-drill the structure part to 5/8" and the deck clearance hole at 1/2". I think I will install the deck and the beam holder t-nuts at the same time so I can insure it is all lining up correctly at the same time.  The last hassle is the cleat for fenders. I had drilled out holes at a location only to figure out I had the fasteners are sitting on the chine. So I fiddled with that (tracing superstructure from the inside) until I found a spot where it made sense to put it, and where I could fit a plywood backing piece on the inside of the deck. The picture below shows the piece of aluminum stock being used to keep this seated as the epoxy cures.

With all this said the good news is that I bought all the flotation jugs today. The main difficulty here is that the warehouse is 45 minutes away. I have a little more fooling around with the deck, and I need to get some wires in that boat. Then I can stat buttoning this up.  Slow going, but as long as I don't think about how long this is taking, it's a good time.