Saturday June 4, 2022
Canopy Fit, Aft Window Backing Strips (Canopy)
4.5 Hours

I decided to take another stab at bending the front of the canopy frame to close up the big gap on the front left side. Here was my setup. The clamp on the left held that side of the frame down at the hinge point. The clamp on the right was applied outboard of the hinge and provided the bending force.

I proceeded slowly and carefully, but I managed to achieve some change and it made a big difference! The "before" picture is here, but it's hard to see the difference in the pictures, I think. I'm not sure what the actual change in the gap was, but it looks so much better now.

Here's a shot of the transition from canopy skin to front skin (before is here). It also significantly improved. I am very happy that I was able to make this better.

Something about the bending changed the gap between the aft window and canopy, so I did some more sanding to restore that gap to 1/32" all the way across.

Then I got to work replacing the aft window backing strips that had I had made before that had bad hole spacing. This time, I held large scrap pieces of 1/32" sheet up to the canopy and marked the holes, then cut out the strips, and finally match drilled them to the window in place in the plane.

It took a while to clean them up and make them relatively constant width.

Finally, I primed and painted them.

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