More canopy trimming
I did two more iterations of marking the front of the canopy, removing it, trimming slightly with the belt sander, polishing the edge with the orbital sander, and putting the canopy back on. I also did one more round of enlarging the slots on the sides. Somewhere in there I also removed the canopy skin, drilled the tabs, and riveted them. Right at the seam between the front canopy frame and the sides, the canopy was sitting kind of tight to the frame. I used a Crescent wrench to bend the frame inward slightly on both sides. That improved the fit quite a bit. In the end, the front of the canopy was sitting down very nicely on the skin with just a few gaps of 1/16″ or so. Maybe one more round of trimming. It’s important to hold in the sides of the canopy when you’re looking at the gap, because that tends to lift the front of the canopy in the middle.
This part of the canopy fabrication definitely takes a lot of patience. I can see why it’s called more of an art than a science. I can’t remember where I read the tip of using a belt sander to do minor trims on the canopy, but that has really worked great.
One other issue that’s been nagging me is that the gap at the front of the canopy skin somehow opened up to 1/8″ on the left side. The right side is a perfect 1/32″. I was ignoring the problem until Julie brought it up again. She noticed that way before my beautiful work on the fit of the canopy bubble. The gap was perfect when I drilled the hinge points, but I guess I had the frame at a bad angle. I don’t know how else it could have happened.
My first thought was to order new plastic blocks for the hinge point. I could redrill the hinge point and pull it forward a little bit on the left side. But then I had possibly a better idea. I could drill out the rivets where the hinge arm is attached to the front of the frame, stick some shims under there, and re-rivet. That would essentially do the same thing, pulling the canopy frame forward. There might be a slight side-effect of screwing up the fit of the skin to the frame. I’ll have to think about it a little more and maybe call Van’s help line.
On a side note, if you haven’t checked out RunwayFinder already, you should. That’s a little side project I’ve been working on for a few months. It turned out pretty nice so far. I posted a note about the project on a Google Maps forum last Thursday to get some advice from the experts. That generated some positive comments. And then suddenly on Monday word hit the pilot communities. The number of users on the site went from the dozens to 2,000. And then 3,000 today. I’ve gotten a lot of postive feedback in the forums and email. I’m glad the site is proving to be popular. Makes the time I spent on it away from RV building worth it.