This log is getting a little out of order. I’ve shown you the crossover reinforcements already but I had to re glass the reshaped inside of the canopy rail first. Here’s a bit of a walk through that process over quite a few days.

I started out by hard shelling the exposed blue foam. This was after countless excursions into the cockpit where I would sit and sand and file until I was happy with the position of things. The next day I ground out a trough for the flox corners. Yes I know the foam looks a bit honeycomb like. I did fill the smaller holes with stiff micro when I did the glass layup. This is still a lot better than laying down on exposed foam which unless super smooth seems to promote air bubbles larger than are acceptable.

After all the prep I measured out the areas where I wanted to join the unaltered canopy frame to the new contours. After some thought I went for BID UNI BID. The previous frame layup was the plans 4 ply and as I was joining on to this I’d be getting 7 ply at the intersections. I felt I could drop a ply for the rest.

All done and peel plied. After the prep work this part is pretty straight forward. A bit like painting something where the laying on the paint is really a small part of the whole job.

OK another angle of the same thing.

I did the end hoop around this time too. Details of that are in an earlier log.

After cure and a tidy up this is the result. You might be able to see that the hinges have inside diagonal areas. The width tapers to fit the new sides. It was very exciting trimming these with an angle grinder. I am getting a little bolder in my quest to finish this airplane.

Now you might get an idea why I went to all this reshaping trouble. The canopy rail is the same width as the longerons except where it has to be wider for the hinges and fittings. This was a later pic sitting inside the cockpit working on the latch.

Here you might see the space gained with the 1″ or so overlap of the longerons removed. It has really improved the cockpit area. At the shoulders where is quite a wide flat area now and it is amazingly comfortable compared to before. Its much improved for the lucky passenger as well.

You might say to yourself. “This guy is pretty dumb.”, “Why didn’t he just correctly shape the canopy rail first and allow for the width needed at the hinges and catches?”

I might be able to do that if I had another canopy to make, maybe. I knew the overlay could be an issue but I didn’t see how to get around it at the time. I just couldn’t see exactly where it was all going to end up or if it even mattered.

If you think you could have, you will be building a lot faster that I am and I’d be pleased for you to send me some of your tips on strake building which is not far away.