A great afternoon at the airport and a visit by Beth, Andrew and Cooper made it perfect! My goal today was to figure out exactly how "perfect" the canopy frame had to be to make the canopy fit. For the longest time I worked on bending the upper bow (shown in photo #1) to try and get within the 3/8" tolerance shown in the plans. Even with Andrew helping, no amount of force would lower the canopy frame below 5/8". I kept thinking "if only I could trim the bottom of the frame by about 1/4 of an inch"...more on that in a minute.
So...with very precise measurements called out...and the slide rail simply duct taped to the fuselage, I started to think that there must be something I was missing and that there were adjustments that could be made later in the process. Yep.
So many RV blogs talk about the hours and hours that are spent bending the canopy frame and the amount of frustration...and I kept looking and measuring and although the sides were about perfect, the front and back didn't match up. Finally I read a simple sentence in the builder's manual that essentially said "don't worry about the height of the canopy frame at this point, that will be dealt with later". Problem solved.
Getting closer...
Canopy is marked and ready to start fitting to frame
