Date:  11-14-2021

Number of Hours:  30

Manual Reference:  18

Kudos goes to Nick Ugolini for this canopy sealing method. Here’s his blog entry. He does say something about it being a weekend job. There are no weekend jobs on my build if that means it gets finished in a weekend. It MIGHT be finished on a weekend after weeks of work is the usual story.

Here’s Nick’s description:- I have found the V-seal to be incredibly effective. The main problem with most seal systems is over crushing of the seal and using cheap weather stripping to seal the canopy. It means your are ALWAYS fighting the seals to close and lock the canopy, over crushing of the seal, and the mis-matching of the canopy to fuselage causing air leaks where the canopy to longeron distance is too great. Imagine a car door. The door gaps are engineered for the seals. The seals are NOT just haphazardly chosen to fit on to hand made doors after they are made.

First up, make some hard points.

That screw with a washer is one of 4 hardpoints I have put in fore and aft. The idea is that the canopy closes onto a fixed corner and then we have the flexible seal in between.

After several tries I made up plastic pieces the same width as the Vee seal I’ll be using less 30% height. Then I covered sections in release tape and plenty of wax.

Here we are with the canopy closed and epoxy/410 filler oozing out.

After cure this is whats left.

After the first clean up, we are starting to get a base for the rubber seal that is perfectly sized for the variable longeron gap.

This is a bit of the yellow spacer I used. On the front lip it had to be curved in two directions. Then I hot glued it in place.

 

Next up tape and wax. You can see some of the completed inside groove too.

The front edge sealed and waiting for the cure.

After I worked it open and a bit of sandpaper we get a clean result.

This is pretty much the groove done. I won’t mention when the canopy got stuck down so badly I had to cut off one of the canopy latches at the front to work it open. Then I had to make a new canopy latch! This has been a really difficult job over three weeks.

The front edge was challenging.

These long sides had to be cut into the canopy  in places and then built back up.

Overall I still don’t know if this is going to work. The concept is sound.

These ends are interesting. They should seal although maybe there will be a very slight gap that I’ll have to deal with. On the plans canopy it would be a MUCH easier job. I just had to do this ultra wide canopy mod didn’t I?

Its going to look better with a little paint. I still have the seals to put in too!

I’ve now added some grey undercoat. It looks better. After the seals it will need proper speckle topcoat and thats going to be a lot of masking work!