In all honesty a piece of 1/8" aluminum painted black would be the best bet. The Plexiglass works, but gets scratched quickly, and is hard to work with. I broke 2 of them before I finally got this one made. Lol. But it will work if you're very careful. My entire bow panel is now only held in by those two screws. I aligned the plexiglass, and the bow panel, and drilled a hole through the plexiglass, and into the fiberglass of the boat. I believe the original mounting holes for the bow panel lined up just fine. The reason I drilled the holes out, was because the original holes were stripped out. So I drilled them a little bit bigger, and used bigger screws to hold everything in place. I used some decorative screw washers to apply a little bit more clamping force on the plexiglass. It's really not that hard to do. Clear as mud right. Haha.