I was on the road all week, so I made limited progress on the canopy.
It has turned quite cold again, with overnight lows around -18°C (0°F). I want the plexiglas nicely warmed up if I'm doing anything that could cause it distress, as it is much more brittle when it is cold, and more likely to crack. Yesterday we ended up running errands most of the day, and I don't like leaving the heater on in the garage when no one is home, so I wasn't able to get it warmed up enough before it was time to go to bed. I left the heater on overnight, and it was nice and toasty in there today (24°C or 75°F).
Today I finished drilled all the holes in the top edge of the fibreglas skirt that attach it to the canopy frame. This is a tricky exercise, because you are trying to match holes that are already in the plexiglas and canopy frame, but the canopy skirt covers those holes up, so you are sort of drilling blind. Before taping the canopy skirt in place, I ran a strip of wide masking tape along the bottom edge of the canopy. I drew a long vertical line centered on each hole, and put a mark exactly two inches above every hole. Once the canopy skirt was in place, I simply extended that line down onto the canopy skirt, and measured down two inches from my mark. This worked out very well - all but three holes that I drilled matched up perfectly with the existing ones, and the three errant holes aren't out by much.
I wanted the garage warm for today's work, just in case the drill nicked the plexiglas as it came through the fibreglas skirt. Now that this part is done I don't have to worry about the temperature so much.
Tomorrow, I'll attack the holes along the bottom of the skirt.
The skirt seems to fit well along the sides, but I'm not happy with the back third. There are several areas where there is a gap between the skirt and fuselage. This gap is generally less than 3/8 inch, but it is up to 5/8 inch in one spot. It looks like I will need to cut some thin wedges out of the skirt to shorten the bottom edge. Oh well - it'll be a lot of fibreglas work, but I'm confident that it'll look fine in the end.
