After several months of not being able to work on the RV for vacations and building a hanger, I finally should be able to dedicate some quality time for the next 2-3 months. Today I started on fabricating the Canopy Side Skirts. The process of fitting the side skirts includes fabricating a main side-skirt and attaching three-separate braces that run the length of the canopy and serves to pull the bottom edge of the skirt in and hold it against the fuselage. The first step in the process is to carefully layout and drill the hole-patterns for the C-660 Canopy Skirts, then modify the corners to fit the fuselage frame and skins. On my airplane the distance from the canopy deck to the canopy frame side bow varies over a half-inch from front to back so I have to skew the top edge of the skirt so it remains parallel to the canopy deck. I can already see this is not going to be any fun because the outside of the skirt needs to be reasonably level with the rivets in the fuselage and the skin need to fit tightly against the fuselage because this is the only exterior weather/air seal for the sides of the canopy. Reading builders-blogs, this is another difficult stage of canopy construction.
