View from the back . . .
. . . and the front.
Short but productive day working on the plane today - we got about half of this riveted together yesterday, and today we finished up the front skin and got the canopy frame stiffeners in there, too.
It's worth noting that this is a pain in the butt to rivet: the shape is awkward, there were more than average numbers of rivets to be drilled out, etc etc. The end result is fine, it just took us awhile to get there.
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View from the back . . . |
. . . and the front. |
Something worth noticing, here: when you first put the canopy frame together, it and get it to fit how you want it to, you'll be happy until you put the struts on. The struts manage to shove the entire canopy forward just enough that the entire canopy sits slightly forward of where it did when the struts were not on. (Those things push forward with a considerable amount of force, so this isn't really a surprise.) What we did at this point - and it may have not been such a hot idea - is to take the effect of the struts into account and put the canopy back just a bit from where you actually want it. Smart, huh? No. After you rivet the frame together - presumably, you've been doing all this fitting with clecos holding the whole thing together - it does not pull forward as much.
It still gets pushed forward to a certain degree, but lots less than we thought it was going to. There's a bit more of a gap between the forward skin and the canopy frame skin than is ideal. Darn.
On the other hand, this probably means that we won't have any issues with the panel clearance.
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