Our tech advisor came by for an inspection prior to glueing the canopy on to the frame and doing the install. He highlighted a few areas that needed to be tweaked on the frame, so I spent a day with a conduit bender going over the rear bow. It matches the curvature of the upper skin much better now, but still has to sit wide at the aft bottom edges in order to not catch on the turtle deck skin during opening. Since we’re glueing everything in place, I had to get the side skins and canopy braces prepped and ready for installation as well. I also spent a day sanding all the plexiglass edges up 400 grit.
After everything was ready, I taped up the canopy and started the Sikaflex process. It’s a 3 part process with a primer, activator and then finally the adhesive. Be careful with the primer, its very thin and gets everywhere. After glueing in place, I put a bunch of clamps on and left it alone for 24 hours. After that I removed the clamps, applied another layer of activator, and then filled all the gaps in with a final layer of adhesive. Then I left it to sit for 2 weeks to fully cure.
While waiting for the canopy to fully cure, the engine showed up. Aero Sport Performance IO-375. 9.6:1 CR, ported/polished cylinders, full SDS ignition and injection, Superior cold air sump, dual alternators, etc. Advertised as 195 hp, but should be good for a bit more.
Now that the canopy is fully glued in place, I know exactly how wide it ended up being. We measured everything on the frame and squeezed in 1/2″ for hopefully make up for the preload of the canopy itself. It turned out a little wider than we wanted, but nothing we shouldn’t be able to make up for. We drilled the top skin and added a doubler plate for the longer RV-8 slider rail. Then we moved on to installing the super tracks and drilling out the rear blocks. I ended up having to do these twice. They still aren’t perfect because the angle of the pins on the canopy frame don’t match the angle of the top rail, so they want to go in at an angle. I made sure the top rail matched the drawing perfectly, so I’m unsure where the issue lies. Opening up the holes in the white mounting blocks allowed the canopy to open and close freely though while still keeping it in place when fully closed.
We also decided to make nutplates for the canopy side tracks. The tracks below captured all the hold down screws, but upon install we found that the rear most hole is on the other side of a bulkhead then the rest. Easily solved by cutting the last nut plate off these and just using a bolt for the rear most screw. It’s easily accessible unlike the others, so this isn’t a big deal.
Now that we had the exact width we could place these and final drill the tracks. Because the canopy ended up wider than expected, we has to shorten some of the stand-offs on the rollers and added shims on the other side to recenter the wheels in the tracks at the final width.
Paul
(Total Build Time 840.1)