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This step invlolves building the canopy deck.
September 2, 2006. Here is the canopy after I added the strip of UNI along the bottom of the canopy. Obviously the peel
ply is still in place. The real trick here is to get a nice line of glass along the tape line. Here's what I did.
As we all know UNI gets "stringy" when cut along with the "grain". To deal with this I measured out the cut lines
on the UNI and then applied a strip of masking tape on the glass just outside this cut line. I then cut out
the glass by cutting down the middle of the tape - no "stringies". I then layed out my strips on plastic and
wet them out with the tape in place. Once wet out I layed another layer of plastic over the tapes and then, using
a straight edge, I cut just below the tape line leaving a clean straight edge. This is the edge applied along
the tape line on the canopy. After cutting I removed the second piece of plastic (just used for the cut) and then
picked up the tape. The trick now is to apply this perfectly straight cut piece of glass to the bottom edge of
the canopy such that the newly cut edge is layed up against the tape line on the canopy. Since the tape line on
the canopy follows a curve its a little tricky because the plastic the UNI is on won't curve like the UNI. Go slow
and be careful with the brush and you can make it work fine. I split the UNI into four strips to go all the way
around. Of course there is a 1" overlap at the three joints.
September 4, 2006. I have begun what turned out to be a rather long (13 hours) process of fitting all the foam blocks
for the canopy deck. Each piece is custom trimmed to fit the curve and height of the canopy at that location. As
is typical, I did the other side in half the time it took to do the first side.
September 5, 2006. A shot of the front. Most of the foam goes side to side except for 5 pieces at the front that go
front to back. No real reason for this, just the way I ended up doing it. I started with one long piece up against
F-28 and then I did the 5 in the center front of the canopy. From there I just worked aft down one side then the
other.
September 7, 2006. And here is all the foam in place. 62 pieces in total. 28 down each side (including transition
piece), 5 in front and one along F-28.
September 7, 2006. A closer shot of the foam layout at the front. You can obviously see two different colors of foam.
Both are the same kind of foam but for some reason one sheet was darker than the other. Kind of cool really. I've
seen blue and pink here on other builder's sites.
September 7, 2006. A shot near the middle of the right side. You can see I numbered each piece. I did this after
getting them all in place because you then need to take them all off again. This way it's easy to put them back
in the right place.
September 7, 2006. A shot of the aft right area. This is my guess as to how to do the transition. Hopefully this is
correct. In chapter 24 a bunch of pour foam is added and glassed aft of this and it all need to blend together
nicely.
September 7, 2006. A shot down the left side looking aft.
September 7, 2006. A crooked view of the left side looking forward.
September 7, 2006. Here's a neat shot from inside the plane. I just stuck the camera through the intrument panel
and aimed up toward the front right corner. This shows how the foam looks from inside. All this foam will get
trimmed flushed with the canopy later on.
September 9, 2006. After fitting all the foam pieces I took them all off so I could make final preparations. For
fun I layed them all out on the workbench. It looked pretty cool sitting there.
September 9, 2006. Another shot of all the canopy deck foam.
September 9, 2006. And another.
September 9, 2006. Why did I put four pictures of this on the here?
September 12, 2006. Here I have most of the sanding completed. But first I microed all of the blocks into place.
I used tiny dabs of micro between each block. I put all the dabs down low so I wouldn't hit them while sanding
them to shape. Yeah, right. What I realized part way through was that even though I was putting the dabs down low
I was putting many right over the outside edge of the longeron. This meant I was still going to hit the dabs. At
least I noticed this early enough that I was able to avoid doing so on the blocks on the other side.
September 12, 2006. A closer shot of the right side. The main sanding is completed here. The foam is flush with the
tape line on the canopy. I need to tweak the line along the longeron to get it straighter. I ended up not using
any of the templates. I just did this all by eye until it looked right to me. The only real question I have at
the moment, concern really, is the shape I made over the front hinge. I've made no attempt to hide the hinge. I
shaped the foam to match the fuselage side. But I may have removed too much near the front of the front hinge.
I'll see soon whether there is enough left here for the hinge mount.
September 12, 2006. A closer shot of the aft end and aft hinge on the right side. The plans never say what to do with
the turtleback flange forward of the cut line. The aft half was trimmed when the turtleback was floxed into place.
I just decided to trim the foward half of the flange like the aft half. This all gets covered later in chapter 24
with the strake fairings. The other vague area, at least for me, was how the glass meets the canopy. I've decided
to have it such that the foam and glass will be even with tape line. You can see this here as the foam forms a
nice transition from the bottom of the forward window to the canopy tape line. Again, this is my choice to do it
this way. I have some pictures of canards where the canopy deck isn't smooth or even from the windows to the canopy
and it just doesn't look right.
September 14, 2006. Here I've sanded the 1/16" depression along the front cut line and along F-28. I've also removed
the foam along the canopy tape line.
September 16, 2006. A closer view of the canopy tape line with the foam removed.
September 16, 2006. Another wide view from the left.
September 16, 2006. And one more view looking forward.
September 17, 2006. Finally came time to glass the canopy deck. I took a (another) hint from Wayne Hicks and decided
to make a template for cutting the glass for a good fit against the canopy. I layed some paper strips on the canopy
deck and then taped some more to each other to get a rough curve. This template covered one half of the canopy deck
from front to back. I then cut all the BID and UNI. Here is how I did the layups:
September 17, 2006. Due to time constraints the evening I did this layup I decided to layup one side of the canopy
deck, add peel ply, and then do the other half another night. The negative to this approach was it was a bit
harder to avoid a small bump in the center where all the glass overlapped.
September 22, 2006.
September 22, 2006.
September 22, 2006.
September 22, 2006.
September 22, 2006.
September 24, 2006.
October 19, 2006.
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