And On With The Canopy

I tried to avoid it but now I had to continue with the canopy anyway. This task really is intimidating to me and I am far away from feeling comfortable with it, rather overwhelmed I'd say.
So as usual in such situations the standard procedure of Divide et Impera works like a charm. Split an overwhelming task into smaller, controllable tasks and the problem appears less scary.
First I verified that the frame has an even 1/8" gap to the canopy deck. That was not the case. I had to remove some of the cardboard in the front as it wanted to push the frame up where it should match the arch of the rollbar. I held it down good with a lot of blue tape applying the necessary force on both sides.


Clamping the bow to the rollbar with the wooden blocks providing the reference for the distance was the next step. I noticed the the frame is not completely symmetric. One side is slightly shorter than the other which introduces a little warp into the structure when forcing it into an even distance to the rollbar. Nothing significant as I believe the canopy glass will even it out once attached to the frame. At least that's what I hope.


Fluting those little angles that will hold the canopy to the sides of the frame was slow but easy to do. Seems that I haven't done this job in a while and I got somewhat rusty. Much more challenging was figuring out how to sufficiently clamp these angels to the frame for the match drilling. Fortunately I had two clamps that were just big enough to do the job. After two clecoes it's easy to support and fine tune the fit by hand while drilling.


Match drilling, removing clecos, deburring, re-clecoing and then for the fun part. You know it, I LOVE riveting!!!



Then some masking tape had to be attached to some possible scratch points around the canopy frame. This was in preparation for fitting the canopy.


The protective plastic cover in the canopy only seem to be thick and bulky on the front inside where it should fit to the front bow of the frame. That's where I peeled the plastic off to allow a close contact. The rest I left in place for now.




Wow, this looks impressive. Almost like a plane :-).
The fit that Van's produced is breath-taking but it also created a concern. The fit on the rollbar is so perfect that there is no way for me to compensate for a not quite so perfect match drilling and alignment of the rear window to that very same rollbar. I had silently hoped that I could fix that by trimming the canopy but this is now obviously out of the question. As I had also cracked the rear window while opening up the holes (because of the fact that I HAD a hand drill and forgot all about it and didn't use it), I decided to suck it up and order another rear window from Carl. There's is no point to try to fix this mess, it would very likely just get worse.
Now I just have to figure out how to create the tangent line on the front bow. Blue chalk on blue tape doesn't sound so good. I'll see if I can find some green painter's tape.