When I did a trial of removing the shields from one of the bearings this past Thursday, I used my scribe to get under the edge. That worked OK, but left a little dent in the shield which I wasn't happy with. In order to avoid that, I tried several approaches to pull the shields off without causing even that minor bit of damage. The approach that finally worked was something my brother, Chris, recommended. I used hot glue to stick the shield to a wood dowel then used the dowel like a handle to pull the shield off. It worked, but probably took 20 attempts for each bearing because the hot glue didn't really want to stick to the shield. Whatever the case, here are six bearings with shields removed ready to be cleaned and regreased. If you click on the image, you can see a larger version that shows the crusty old grease.

All cleaned. Used isopropyl alchol. I'll be regreasing them with some Mobil SHC 100 that my friend, Greg, gave me years ago. I put some in this little syringe to make it easier to load these little guys with grease.

Reassembled. These turn smooth as silk now. :-)

I had planned to torque some of the bolts, but my torque seal was all dried up. To bring it back to life, I sucked some laquer thinner into the tube. It should be soft again in a day or so.

This photo is a reminder to myself that I did torque the bolts holding the bearings in the bellcranks as well as the bolts holding the bellcranks to the shaft/tube.

Here's that aft canopy bow after filling the shrinker marks with epoxy.

I assembled this little rib that goes under the centerline of the upper, forward fuselage skin.

...and riveted it in place.

I also riveted the joint plates to the canopy frome, including the little wedges. In order to get the tightest possible rivet joint, I used this custom squeezer die so that the rivet head (only!) would be squeezed and that the rivet heads are a line-to-line fit with the countersunk holes.

Here's another view.