Finish Kit 4
8/23/05 4.5 Hours
Tonight, I started to do the rear canopy anchor blocks. It didn't seem too bad. Getting it all lined up was quite interesting, and making sure everything was running true.
I marked out the blocks, and measured the pin angles. Then I transfered all the info to the blocks. I set up a machine vice on the drill press to take into account all these angles, and went drilling! Here's my set up for the vice. You can probably tell by all the plastic shavings that this was taken after the fact.
Once the hole was drilled to the 1/4" Van's specified, it wouldn't fit over the pin at all. Hmmm. Well, I guess a bigger hole will have to be drilled. I ended up taking the holes out the a J drill size. I think that's 0.272". This gave a nice sliding fit to the pins. Then I positioned them on the pins, slid the canopy closed and drilled the mounting holes. Well, all this went quite smoothly. Once that was done, I tried opening and closing the canopy. It's quite hard to get it open. Closing it is OK if you give it a bit of a tug when you're closing it, but there's no way to get any decent leverage anywhere to open it.
I tried tweaking things some to try to get it to open easier. The left side is no problem, but the right side seems to be the sticky one. I'm happy with the fit too. I'm using the blocks to pull in the rear of the canopy some to get a tighter skirt fit. I had to pull the rear bow out some when I was going through hell with the frame bending a while back so it would clear the fuselage skin. I wonder if it will loosen up over time?
Here's a shot of everything in place. I still need to countersink the holes for the screws.
Here's the completely closed canopy.
And for the hell of it, here's what the back looks like as far as fit goes. It's pretty nice. All that tweaking was worth it so far. We'll really see when I put the skirts on!
8/28/05 9.5 Hours
Today was a good day at the hangar, apart from the late start. I continued on with the canopy, specifically the lower skirts. There's still a long way to go with all this stuff, but I'm hoping to get the canopy finished up in the next week or two.
First thing was to cut out some new skirt from some 0.032" sheet stock I had lying around. I needed to make mine longer than the plans call out since I messed up the measurement between the canopy plexi and the lower frame rails. Oops. I also wanted the bottom of the skirts to be in line with the bottom edge of the rear turtle deck skin. Just me being anal again. It's little details like this that make a plane nice. Once I had the basic shapes cut out, I started attaching them to the canopy using a strap duplicator. This worked great. The first hole I used for the datum was the front one. Then I went from there with everything clamped and/or cleco'd in place. Here you can see the start of it. The skirt is a lot longer than it need be right now.
Here's the right side fully cleco'd. As you can see, it fit's great! All this without any bending yet either. I have to say, I'm quite pleased with the results of thus far.
Next was to trim the height of the skirt down to match the fuselage proper. At the front, it requires a cutout to clear the fuselage deck as the canopy slides back. You have to remove a fair bit of material to achieve this. I managed to get a nice gap that wasn' too big, and still clear the deck OK. Since my skirts are longer, my cutout had to extend a bit further back too. Turned out to be about an inch more than the plans.
Once all that was done, I marked out where I wanted the holes along the top of the skirt to attach the canopy plexi. These holes will eventually take No. 6 screws. Once it was all pilot drilled to No. 40, it was time to cleco the whole thing together and drill No. 30 through the canopy (gulp!). Turned out lovely! Damn, I'm almost out of No. 30 clecoes!
Here you can see how my gaps are working out. Remember how much bending I had to do to the frame? Now I know it was worth every hour! This is the right side...
And the left side. A little bigger. but not by much.
Mike came over to see how I was getting on, and to see the engine. He's not been over since I finished my panel, so it was the first time he'd seen that too. He was going to help me put the skirt braces on, but we ended up messing around with other stuff. It didn't help that I hadn't got the braces done either! Anyways, once Mike had left, I managed to rough out the relief holes. During the week, I'll get these cleaned up and fitted. Be wary of the dimensions shown in the plans when you come to make these. Mine were not even close to the dimensions that Van's shows. Basically, set your lengths up so the braces fit in the canopy frame, then mark your end holes, then make all the holes in between. It looks like Van's calls out 22 holes for the rivets to the frame rail, but using something close to their spacing callout, I could only fit 20!
9/2/05 13 Hours
What a long day! I bounced about a fair bit today working on various things, one of which was the canopy skirts. I cleaned up the inner braces, and made the splits in the lower flange. Now these things are floppy!
Next task was to fit them to the lower canopy frame rails. This was pretty easy. What was a little more tricky was the fact that with the cleco's in there, I couldn't go opening the canopy! Arrgh, what a pain! Still, we'll get through it somehow. Here's the right side.
Cameron was around, so I enlisted him to help me drill the lower flange of the brace to the skirts. I'd took the time to figure out where to draw a straight line so that all the rivets would be properly centred on the brace flange, and still be in a nice straight line on the outside of the skirt. Once I'd got this set, I drill No. 40 holes in the skirt. We then put it all back on the canopy and I got in and pushed the brace out to the skirt while Cam held the skirt in position and drilled. We had to open the canopy to get the last few holes as the mounting blocks were in the way at the back end there.
It's hard to see from this photo as it's a bit blurry, but the skirt is nice and flush with the fuselage side. Nice. I think the camera was wondering what to focus on!
It doesn't seem like I got much done for the amount of time I was at the hangar today, but at least the canopy is mostly done now. It took me quite a while to make the rear skirts, but they did turn out quite nice. They fit really tight against the fuselage. Almost too tight really, as the canopy is now really hard to pull fully closed. There's an eighth inch gap to the roll bar where previously there was zero.
First thing I did today was to rivet the skirt braces to the canopy frame with the LP3-4 blind rivets. Finally, riveting some parts of this thing together! I can't really do any more coz I need to paint stuff first.
I have a strap duplicator on order from Cleveland, but I decided to just make one. It didn't take too long, and it's thinner than the ones you usually buy from the tool vendors. I also wouldn't have been able to complete all the stuff I did today without it. They're pretty easy to make. I used an AN4 rivet as the locator, and squashed it just enough to be tight and to fit in the 5/32" holes in the plexi. The drill hole is a No. 40, so I won't be drilling the rivet out if I go to far! That's what drill stops are for!
I blocked open the canopy with some small peices of wood. In hindsight, for us, this might have been a mistake as the time spent tweaking the canopy frame really made the fit look great anyway. I guess tighter is better than looser... Or is it?
I got an idea where the skirt would lie, then drilled the first hole at the top to help hold it in position. Then I taped it down at the bottom. This was only temporary, as it would be coming up and down a lot for the strap duplicator to go in and out. I worked on the left side first. It looks like it's going to fit well! Here, the edge cuts are quite rough. I left as much extra material around Van's outlines as I could.
Here's what it's looking like as I work my way down. It's definitely very tight. In theory, once this is trimmed down some, it should ease the tightness to the fuselage. Didn't really turn out that way!
Here we are all clecoed. I trimmed the rear edge to where I thought they should be. I had the rear edge follow the rivets that attach the fuselage skin stiffeners. I ended up taking more off the rear edges than this too in an attempt to relieve the tightness! Those lines you can see running with the curve of the fuselage (in the auto industry, we call them reflect lines) are to help me with putting some bend in the skirt when it's off the plane completely. I can twist it 90 degrees to these lines and get about the right curvature to match the fuselage.
I took this skirt off what seemed about a thousand times. My fingers were aching by the end of the day from the cleco pliers. I do have some pneumatic ones, but I don't like the lack of feel they seem to have. Well, I trimmed the front edge here, and took another half inch off the back edge. All the time, I was checking the canopy opening and closing. I think at this point, I was happy with the left side. I did end up taking another half inch off later though. Now, on to the right.
The left side took me five hours to make. Yep, five hours. I couldn't believe it either. With the right side though, I knew what I was doing, so I was good to go... Steaming along now! The right only took me three and a half hours! Still a long time. The dull area you can see on the rear edge of the skirt was where I decided to start getting clever and attacking the skirt with Mike's stretcher. I wanted to be really carefull with it, and while it did stretch it a little, it really didn't make much difference with the fit. It was still tight, especially in the area where I'd tried stretching it. This is the skirt I'm considering remaking, with the canopy closed fully rather than blocked open. It won't take me long to do now I know what I'm doing!
Here's a couple of pics to show how tight this thing is!
There's not going to be any room under there for paint or slippy tape. This is why I'm thinking about redoing them. Well, I'll ponder it over the next couple of days. All the talk of these being difficult had too much influence over the methodology used to get 'em snug. See how all that frame tweaking can pay off? Or not as the case may be. If you're at the frame tweaking stage, I recommend that you take all the time you need to get it on the money. Then your skirts will be really easy.