Back to the Canopy

I feel like the honeymoon is over.  Steven came out on Saturday and helped me remove the wings.  Its kinda sad because it really looked like an airplane for a while there!  Anyway a few more tasks are complete including redoing a couple.  I had to replace the motor mount bolts that I used to install the motor mount.  For some reason Van's sent me non drilled bolts which means I could not put cotter pins in after torquing them.  I ordered new bolts and after removing the wings Steven helped me replace them one at a time...with the engine supported by the engine hoist.  After that it was time to start looking at finishing up the slider.

One last task before removing the wings was drilling the gap fairing.  This will get countersunk screws that will attach to the nutplates I have to put in the wing.  This step was to position and drill the required screw holes.

Saturday morning while I waited for Steven to come out I decided it was time to get the flap position sensor installed and adjusted.  here is the end result.  This was a little tricky because the sensor only has one inch of travel but the flap arm can travel much more depending on where I install the adel clamp that holds the other end of the sensor rod.

One more task I completed while I was waiting was to install the "Nose Job" from AntiSpat Aero.  This little device is suppose to prevent the nose gear from folding under if I ever hit something hard enough.

And this is the first iteration of my plan for fabricating the canopy skirt.  The idea here was to bridge the gap with this packing tape and then use some bondo type material to smooth it over.  well that didn't work so good....  Lost about 4 hours of work on this one.

Top view of the same layup.

You can see the hole in these bolts...Now I can install the cotterpins.

And here is version number two.  This time I didn't bother trying to smooth it out with bondo.

And here it is about 3 hours later with two layers of glass and two layers of carbon fiber laid up.  Tomorrow the sanding begins...not looking forward to that.

Top view.  The top layer is actually fiberglass but the layer underneath is carbon fiber so the whole thing looks like carbon fiber when its wet.  The glass is clear when its wet.