August 7, 2005

It didn’t feel like I accomplished too much today, although I was working for six hours! Oh well. I wanted to figure out starting the skirts for the sides of the canopy, so I started working through the directions to get to that point.

I removed the plexi from the frame, and made the final cuts. Then, I sanded all the edges smooth with 18- grit, then 320 grit, then 400. Once I’m happy with everything, I’ll polish up the edges with some T-Cut paint cutting compound. This stuff works a treat on edges of plexi. Once the final cuts were out of the way, I dug out the centre strip that runs along the spine of the canopy and back drilled it . I was surprised to see that my holes weren’t that bad as far as how wobbly a line they plotted!

Next, I countersunk all the holes. Some need to be for rivets, and some need to be for a dimpled sheet of aluminium. My countersink cage was running a bit hot after this! Then, I drilled all the hole I had made so far out to 5/32" with the plexi drill. This makes nice holes!

I also drilled all the holes out to #30 in the frame and deburred them.

Here is the canopy in place after all that was done. This is the front half showing the alignment to the roll over bar. I haven’t done the height adjustment here yet.

Here’s the rear half, showing the alignment to the fuselage. It came out really nice. I guess all that tweaking of the frame previously was worth while. Hopefully, I won’t have to mess too much with my skirts when I come to make them.

The next task in the book was the windshield. I thought I might put the front skin on temporarily to work out the fitting, but I gave up on that idea and decide to just lay the windshield in place for now. The book wants you to do all the fitting and drilling, but it can wait until later. I’d like to have the skin in place permanently before I mess with any of this.

Here, the windshield is laid on the plane, and centred so I can adjust the height of the canopy. I forgot to take one in the closed position. Duh! Well, take my word for it, it’s not bad. The fit worked out really well. I’ll need some small shims in the upper corners of the windshield, but not really too much. At the top and sides where it really matters, it fits nicely.

So now I’ve reached a roadblock. For some reason known only to me, I want to TIG weld the roller brackets to the frame. I don’t want to see all these unsightly screws in the frame. I know there’s a whole slew of them running down the canopy skirts, but that’s different to one going through a piece of tube. It just doesn’t look good in my opinion. So, I’ll be making provision to remove the rollers should the canopy ever have to come off for service. I need to find me a quality TIG welder that can do this for me. There must be one around somewhere! Then, I can get on and paint (ugh!) the frame and start on the skirts.

In the meatime, I figured out how much to cut off the latch tube to match the roll over bar, and cut it off with a tubing cutter in situ. It was about this time that I had to leave the hangar to go get some real German Schwarzwaldkuchen (Black Forest Cake) that I ordered to take to work tomorrow for my birthday, so the latch will have to wait.