Sun Nov 15 2020

Canopy forward skin

To backdrill the lowermost row of holes through the triangle gusset arms and through the skin, I used some duct tape and a scrap piece of plywood to pull the skin tight. Just tape it up in this position...

...and lever it up. Nice and tight.

Time to transfer the cut lines from the longerons to the forward canopy skin. There is a vertex at the downward bend of the longerons, so first I used a scale to transfer the horizontal longeron line to the skin.

Similarly, I used a reference edge to transfer the down-sloping portion of the longeron to the canopy forward skin. Here, I have a piece of aluminum with a nice, straight edge referenced to the longeron. I'll slip the canopy skin down between this piece and the side of the fuselage.

...thusly.

Trimmed and filed the excess material off. Still needs a bit of filing, but looking pretty good.

...same on the other side.

The skin needed a bit of additional curl, so I used this scrap of oak banister and a soft mallet to pound a little bit more curl into the skin near the edge.

Also, I could tell that the bend I had made previously needed extended somewhat towards the forward end. Using the male bending tool and mallet, I carefully extended the bend. This actually worked really well. I think that this bend could be done in its entirety using this approach.

Okay, it's really fitting very well. A bit of filing left to go.

Nice fit to the longeron. You can see that I need to file a bit more to allow a bit of clearance.