September 2, 2005

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!