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Dave's RV-7A Builder's Log
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Date:  9-14-2013
Number of Hours:  4.50
Manual Reference:  
Brief Description:  Canopy

Four spacers and four holes...four and a half hours. Not exactly how I'd planned it when I went to the hangar early this morning. It all started ok, just had to make a couple of spacers to fit under the canopy frame...no problem. That actually went fairly quickly until I had to drill the aft two spacers to fit the pilot holes in the aft canopy deck. The challenge was that there is no access from underneath to hold the spacer in place to be marked. This lack of access played havoc with me all morning. I finally rigged up a method using needle nose pliers and got everything marked and drilled. On to the actual steel tube roll bar, which had to be slightly bent to fit.

The builders manual says something like "if the steel tube needs to be bent inward, simply place one end on the floor and push against it. Go sloooow, it's easy to bend too much". No it's not. In fact, I spent 30 minutes bouncing against the tube and didn't get even 1/16th of an inch of progress. The second photo shows how I finally got the tube to bend into place.

With the tube finally in place I climbed inside and used my #40 flexible bit to drill the first hole. After I got one hole through the steel of the frame, the bit broke on the second hole. Climb out, grab the #30 bit, climb back in and make it work. Finally got the holes drilled and had to enlarge all of them to the appropriate size. Now to put the bolts in...and nuts on. Back to the same problem I faced before. I left to figure this one out another day.
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Drilling out the canopy frame spacers

Drilling out the canopy frame spacers

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This is one way to pull the roll bar together

This is one way to pull the roll bar together

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Finally...

Finally...

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