September 11, 2005

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.