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Dave's RV-7A Builder's Log
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Date: 5-6-2017
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Number of Hours: 4.00
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Manual Reference:
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Brief Description: Canopy frame final adjustments
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There should be a rule that Van’s won’t sell a slider canopy to a builder unless they can show evidence that they have built one before. Put another way, now that I know what I am doing, my next slider canopy will be built completely differently. To take two structures of welded steel and a large bubble of plexiglass and turn the front half into a windshield and the rest into a canopy that slides fore and aft effortlessly, closes tightly, latches securely, and seals out wind & water may not be impossible…but gets close. The biggest challenge so far has been the fact that during initial adjustment of the frame, I hadn’t accounted for the amount of force the canopy would exert against the rollers, and now literally forces them out against the sides of the roller tracks. This serves to make the roller assembly actually not roll, but rather just slide along the outside of the tracks. Lots of resistance and it’s way too late to try and bend it now due to the high likelihood of cracking the canopy and frame.
I started working on the final fitting and drilling of the forward canopy frame to the roller assemblies. Another challenge I faced here was that during some part of the initial fitting of canopy to windscreen, I had cut the frame tubes down to lower the canopy, and once everything was installed for the final time, I actually had to raise them up to get the canopy & windscreen transition correct. This left me with barely enough edge distance to make the bolt holes. In order to ensure that I didn’t have anything go astray during drilling, and since it obviously wasn’t going to fit on a drill press, I made the spacers and drill jig shown in the photos. As the holes themselves were only ¾” above the canopy rail, none of the drills I had would get into that space without drilling at a slight downward angle, so I used an attachment in my Dremel, drilled through the assemblies with a 1/8” bit, and then pulled the canopy off to enlarge the holes with a 3/16" reamer for the bolts.
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Clamping shims to ensure roller is aligned with track
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Makeshift drilling jig
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