Finishing Kit

December is wrapping up, and its the end of the year. Wow. Over the last couple of days, I've managed to make some progress. I picked up where I left off last time with the canopy side skirts. Having laid out all the rivet holes and pre-drilling them, it's now time to drill the skirts to the canopy frame.

You can't see from the outside, but the canopy frame is clamped down to the side rails. I did the drilling with the canopy off, obviously. These shots were taken later, after I deburred the holes and cleaned everything up and put the canopy back on. I wanted to cleco every hole and check the fit, and see how it all looks.

Above, here's the aft end of the right side. I'm very happy with how this is all fitting together.

Another shot of the right side above.

Here's a closeup of the forward end. I got a nice tight fit to the forward canopy skin.

And here's the left side. Looking good to me. Below, a shot from a little further away. The canopy lays on the frame nicely now and fits like a glove. No gaps anywhere.

I don't think I can possibly get it to fit any better than this. I'm going to call it quits on the fitting phase of this whole canopy project!

The only thing left now, and it's minor but must be done, is to trim the aft end of the canopy as it goes over the roll bar, a small amount here and there, to make it fit the line drawn way back when I started to prepare for the big cut. I was waiting to do that until I had these side skirts finished and clecoed in place, because they sort of pull in the sides of the canopy, and that tends to push the length out a bit on the back end. Now I can tweak the fit a bit more back there and finish it.

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