August 23, 2005

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!