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RV-9A: Canopy - 6/2/2013
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Started work on the C-763 Slide Spacer
I've heard stories about the canopy and how confusing it can be. Here's a head scratcher... trying to figure out where to put the holes in the slide spacer for the rivets and screws.

Riveting the C-762 and C-763 parts together
The C-763 Slide Spacer comes pre-bent, but I went ahead and checked it against the angle in the drawing to make sure that the angle was right. The flat C-762 strip gets riveted to the C-753 spacer. Here I am trying to decipher where to put the rivet holes, which wasn't too difficult to figure out. But the screw holes were a different story. I found out later why.

Drilled and clecoed the parts together
I noticed right away that the top flat strip didn''t want to bend very easily to the shape of the rod spacer, but the instructions didn''t say anything about pre-bending the flat strip, so I didn''t. This I would regret not doing later.

Riveted the C-762 and C-763 parts together
After riveting the C-762 and C-763 parts together, I noticed that when I tried to pull the C-762 flat strip down to fit the contour of the C-763 spacer, that a gap formed between the part, as shown by the green arrow in the picture. DAMMIT! So I added one more rivet to close the gap. On my next RV (he-he), I will pre-bend the C-762 to fit the angle of the C-763 spacer bar. ALSO, I went ahead and drilled the holes for the screws and I probably shouldn't have. I read later that the position of the slider bar on the back of the fuselage might need to move around when positioning the inside canopy bars to make it fit and move correctly over the slider bar. Hopefully this won't bite me in the ass later.

Now to trim the canopy track a bit
Once again. I got the cart before the horse. I went ahead and trimmed the track pieces according to the drawing measurements. But what I should have noticed was the statement "As required for proper canopy tracking". What I should have done was fitted the canopy frame to the tracking and the determined how much to trim off the tracking to make the outer edge flush with the outside skin of the fuselage. As you will see later, this turned to not be an issue, because of fool's luck. Everything fit perfectly. Rule # 1 - "Read all the instructions before starting anything".

Here''s the track trimming job
The table top sander works well for this.

Here the trimmed track on one side
Notice that the outside edge of the trimmed track is flush with the outer skin of the fuselage.

Clamped the C-657 Canopy Tracks to the fuselage
Not sure is the positioning is right on these guys. I decided to use the back position of the track where it got trimmed and matched to the fuselage skin as starting point. Then I measured the distance from one canopy track to the other across the cockpit in between to make the distance consistent all the way down.

Tried the canopy frame on for size
What do ya' know... the damn thing fits perfectly! I need to go buy a lottery ticket.

Tried out the canopy slider
I attached the plastic slider onto the slider track and taped it to the fuselage. The holes that hold the slider in place will be put in later after I determine the exact position of the canopy.