Thanks for the compliments and the questions. I look forward to seeing your Faith 7!
Rivets are made by cutting disks from the thinnest rod size available from Evergreen Plastic. Think of slicing a sausage, and you'll get the idea. I then pick up each with a sharp X-Acto knife, lightly "spearing" it, if that makes sense. I touch the disk to a bit of adhesive (cement if going on plastic, superglue if going on painted surface), then affix it to the desired location. It's tedious, but goes by surprisingly quickly when you get the hang of it.
The various components, including the batteries, were made with Evergreen sheet plastic. Basically, I just made a bunch of six-sided boxes (some components were a bit more than that, of course). I sanded these down and primed them. Small components were cut from solid square or rectangle rod stock.
The references are great, but I confess that my objective is to get the model around 75% accurate to the real thing. The documents are used as a baseline for construction, because the actual vehicles were modified and adjusted with time, deviating from the specs. I figure "close enough" works - like an impressionist painting, I suppose. I want to capture the essence of the Mercury Program in a model - cramped, cluttered, analog, scary, damn-the-torpedoes, all-or-nothing, spam-in-the-can...